Chef Marc Del Pietro owns two local restaurants, The Block in Webster Groves and 58hundred in Southwest Garden. He’s also the chef-in-residence at Our Lady of Lourdes School. He volunteered for the side gig while his two children were attending school there, and he’s still the “cafeteria chef” a decade later. His goal, then and now, is to provide healthier food alternatives to standard parochial school fare by incorporating more fresh food into the daily cafeteria experience. On Burger Day, he started serving turkey burgers (just calling them “burgers”) and sneaking a little squash purée into the mac and cheese, practices that he still follows today. “But I still can’t make or even mention ‘pot roast,”’ he says. “No kid likes that word.” When schools closed temporarily in March, the chef thought he’d get some time off. No such luck. Parents reached out during the pandemic, and he produced practical suggestions and an occasionally creative answer. (“When I was asked what oranges I used, I said, ‘There’s no secret. Go buy some Florida oranges, and just say they’re the ones I use.’”) When school reopened, the cafeteria didn’t, forcing Del Pietro to shift gears. Meals were still freshly made on-premise, but now they were served to students in classrooms (“four waves of 20 to 30 students each”) in three-compartment containers (main dish, fruit, veggie).
Turkey burgers, chicken tacos (made with braised thigh meat), and baked hand-breaded chicken strips remain the favorites, or so Del Pietro thinks. “Serving individual meals allows us to serve bigger portions to the bigger kids, which is a plus,” he says, adding that without the cafeteria setting, it’s hard to determine what’s popular, what isn’t, and whether tastes are changing. “We can deliver,” he says, “but we can’t monitor.”
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