Home / Education / Q&A: Billie DeNunzio, Director Of Eastside High School’s Culinary Arts Academy
Q&A: Billie DeNunzio, Director Of Eastside High School’s Culinary Arts Academy
By Dylan Dixon
February 11, 2017 Education
Billie DeNunzio is definitely the director of your Culinary Arts Academy at Gainesville’s Eastside Secondary school. DeNunzio has led this system to rank best lawn mowers of their state for nine consecutive years, as well as recently being named the 12th best hospitality enter in america with the National Center for Hospitality Studies. This lady has been the director with the academy for 20 years. DeNunzio is an evaluator for that American Culinary Federation and contains worked Pearson Publishing during the past like a culinary and hospitality textbook reviewer. Before moving to Gainesville to teach in 1975, she worked for a long period in Atlanta as a banquet manager on a?Quality Inn. She actually is currently devoting virtually all her time for them to help turn Eastside High’s culinary arts into the most effective in the country.
WUFT: You are the director of just one of the top twelfth grade culinary arts programs in the nation. Is it doesn’t the best in a state. You’ve won countless awards. How pleased think you’re with the information you’ve built hassle-free Eastside Senior high school?
BD: Well, I’m pretty pleased for any students a result of the impact commemorate about them, plus the impact it can make within the community, as far as letting people find out about the program. On the list of big things with students this age is because they determine what they wish to do, nevertheless they are not familiar with the avenues that they have to proceed through to accomplish it. So if something gets while in the paper or gets in the news, chances are they learn about us, and from there it assists the program grow.
WUFT: Do you give you a basic rundown with the exactly your program entails? So what can the scholars figure out how to do?
BD: Well, it comes down to sanitation safety. First-year students get yourself a lower degree certification, after which by their second year, they get ServSafe, the national certification for sanitation safety. So that’s the starts, and then they also learn stocks and sauces and all the basics inside their 1st year. From edinburgh, though, they’re able to do not delay- start show creativity. We’ve got a giant give attention to management. Management is a big part, about 1 / 2 with the program. If you feel regarding this with restaurants, should you be getting an education, precisely what are you probably going to be doing within a restaurant? You’re either the manager chef or you’re manager or perhaps assistant manager or a buyer, that type of thing. And we all go a whole lot into that. The culinary should be only half of it. Hospitality management is a other.
WUFT: It’s my understanding too that you had the reasoning to make usage of a student-run coffee bar on Eastside’s campus. The content the thinking behind that?
BD: Well, you will find a dining facility that seats 100 people, and we’ve set up a complete coffee bar there. We have got espresso machines. They actually do lattes. They certainly Frappuccinos. The students think the idea is to create a coffee bar and sell and such thinggs as that. However, the best idea is entrepreneurship. Anything we order or we cater that individuals do in the kitchen area
