When fall classes started at St. Charles Community College this week, one of the new faces in the culinary program was an innovative chef and CEO from Dallas, Texas, with a background in creating destination dining venues. Executive director and head chef Jay Valley joined the Field to Table Institute earlier this summer as it prepares to launch a café and market and grow its educational offerings.
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Valley spent the past decade at Saint Rocco’s New York Italian, where he was executive chef and co-owner alongside industry legend Phil Romano. Valley was also the driving force behind other culinary ventures on the property, including the Holy Crust pizza joint and Sum Dang Good modern Chinese restaurant. Prior to that, he worked with Romano for 17 years at EatZi’s Market and Bakery, a European-style venue offering chef-crafted meals to go, 45 varieties of bread, an extensive bakery selection, and packaged specialty foods, as well as dining options including a pasta bar, a sushi bar, a grill, a coffee bar, and a deli.
The Field to Table Institute consulted with Valley about its plans to open a market and eatery as part of its new 15,000-square-foot facility, slated for completion in early 2026. A couple of weeks after their lunch at Saint Rocco’s, he received a call from the institute. “If you are a chef in this world and you heard what I heard, you would want to have this job,” he says. The institute offered him latitude to shape its new offerings from the ground up. “We get to plan it. We get to grow it. We get to create it. We get to produce it,” he says. “All of that, and we get to teach the up-and-coming culinarians how to operate a market. It’s just the perfect opportunity.”
Since arriving in St. Charles, Valley has demonstrated the hospitality mindset that he developed during 45 years in the restaurant industry. For instance, he has been using the farm’s abundance of fresh chile peppers to cook the Southwest cuisine that he’s missing from Texas as a form of research and development on the wood-burning oven and grills in the institute’s outdoor kitchen.
“On Saturdays, we go out there and do R&D,” Valley says. “Over 60 people from the neighborhood have already stopped by and tried a sample because they’re out walking the trail.” The Dardenne Creek Campus, where the institute is located, is part of St. Charles Community College’s extensive network of public use trails, and Valley plans to cook there on Saturday mornings throughout the fall.
Valley says he’s enjoyed exploring the region’s culinary scene and farmers markets. While he misses his wife and dog (both of whom will be joining him here soon), he is also having fun discovering neighborhoods such as The Hill, where he can celebrate his Italian heritage.
The Field to Table Institute
St. Charles Community College established the Field to Table Institute in 2019, converting a former gymnasium into a test kitchen, commercial kitchen, bakery, and brewing lab through a grant from a MoExcels Workforce Initiative. The college has also converted soccer and baseball fields into a garden where the agriculture program grows a large variety of crops and the culinary program benefits from the harvest—everything from 17 varieties of tomatoes to Swiss chard, corn, blackberries, and pumpkins.
Three years ago, the college added the Freight Farm, a hydroponic “vertical farm” inside a shipping container. The Freight Farm and a greenhouse allows agriculture and culinary students to grow crops year-round. Valley says he’s excited to incorporate the growing panels from the Freight Farm into the market area—giving the culinary team the ability to harvest fresh greens and herbs as they’re needed—and he’s excited to experiment with new crops. “It’s incredible the amount you can grow in there,” he says.
In mid-July, St. Charles Community College broke ground on the café and market. Construction is scheduled to be completed in March 2026. Valley says its offerings will include a grab-and-go case with prepared meals, as well as a made-to-order salad counter, a sandwich deli with house-made charcuterie, and a “hot area” for items such as roasted chicken. The café will be open to the public from Tuesday through Saturday for lunch and dinner, with breakfast to be added later in the coffee and pastry area. “Because it will be a small market, we can do some really nice stuff,” Valley says. “We can teach these kids to make smoked salmon and lox. We can offer a New York strip and a bone-in New York strip.” The institute will also continue to offer catering and event services.
St. Charles Community College president Dr. Barbara Kavalier says the college is thrilled to welcome Valley. “Jay’s remarkable culinary expertise and leadership—honed at some of Dallas’ most esteemed establishments—bring a dynamic vision to our program,” she says. “The school is taking an innovative approach to everything that we’ve been doing, and this holistic approach to the culinary field is another example of reshaping traditional programs in a more innovative way.”
Valley says one of the reasons he was able to excel as a corporate chef was his belief in educating up-and-coming culinarians. “It’s a very rewarding career,” he says, “but it’s hard. It’s a lot of hours and a lot of work. It’s not for everybody. But it’s a lot of fun, too.”
Along with the essentials, such as knife skills and kitchen math, Valley says it’s important for today’s culinary students to understand what to do when they get a bad review and how to interact when a customer complains on social media. “If you can respond to a person correctly, you’ll have a customer for life,” he explains. “I wish I’d had some of that coming up myself, teaching me how to deal with it.”
Valley says the institute has a strong curriculum and an excellent team in place. “Everybody really cares about the students, and that to me is very impressive,” he says. “Their enthusiasm is contagious. And knowing that restaurants are interested in hiring our students motivates you to prepare them well.”
