The Gary Comer Youth Center serves young people aged 8 to 24 on the Southside of Chicago.
Our Culinary Department offers our members the opportunity to explore food and nutrition through enrichment programming, youth employment, and free meal services. The Gary Comer Youth Center, located in Greater Grand Crossing on Chicago's Southside, is the cornerstone of the Comer Education Campus. The Culinary Department provides services to our members through afterschool programming, free daily
meal services, teen and young adult employment, and catering services. On our YouTube channel we share videos with Healthy Hacks, Quick & Easy recipes, healthy snacking, and recipes and budgeting for family meals! On our Instagram page we share recipes and day-to-day moments from our operations. Here on Facebook, we look to share and engage with a community of people that may further benefit from our work and the work of our young people! Our Key Staff:
Chef Gina Bates
Owner and founder of Sweet & Savory Chefs Academy, Chef Gina is a classically trained savory and pastry chef with over 27 years of industry experience. She teaches food education by focusing on basic cooking and baking skills so participants become empowered young chefs. Chef Jon Bates
Chef Jon is the Assistant Culinary Manager of the Gary Comer Youth Center. He's a certified Pastry Chef, with nearly 10 years experience in the industry. Passionate about food and fresh ingredients, he takes pride in teaching proper baking technique and preparing healthy foods. Chef Remy Price
Chef Remy is the Associate Director of Culinary Arts at the Gary Comer Youth Center. She uses her unique background in education, athletics and culinary arts to guide the department's operations.
10/10/2023
Help us give hundreds of youth on the Southside of Chicago a safe and happy Halloween! Our annual Halloween Fest is Saturday, October 28th and we need your candy donations to make sure every single child leaves the event with a bag of candy.
Drop off candy at Gary Comer Youth Center or buy online and ship it directly to 7200 S Ingleside Ave, Chicago, IL 60619.
Every child deserves all the fun of spooky season in a safe, friendly, joyful environment!
Registration for Fall programs is now open! We have a buffet of great culinary options available for you and your young person this year!
Comer Cooking Club 1 is an introductory program for middle schoolers to explore the culinary arts! Learn basics kitchen safety, knife skills, and cooking techniques in this program taught by Chefs Jon and Remy! Comer Cooking Club 1 meets from 4-5pm on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Visit comereducationcampus.org for more information on how join and enroll.
06/08/2021
Basil anyone? We are officially mid-Summer! We are overrun with basil and tomatoes! What glorious problems to have 🍅🥫🌱
Come fill up on basil and tomatoes at our farmers markets on Tuesdays and Fridays from 3-6pm.
What are your favorite basil or tomato recipes? Share in the comments!
27/07/2021
This year’s culinary apprentices are Crocs enthusiasts… once they clock in they activate “sports mode” because it’s been a BUSY SUMMER!
19/07/2021
Meet the new kids on the block: The Danny Zuko warm bowl & Champs Elysees salad. Now available at the Culinary Apprentice Salad Bar!
THE DANNY ZUKO is a warm bowl featuring lemon pepper zucchini zoodles, umami bomb braised tofu, pickled green tomato succotash, sautéed greens and garlic, over a bed of whole grain focaccia panzanella, with citrus vinaigrette.
THE CHAMPS ELYSEES is a hot take on a Niçoise. Roasted Old Bay spiced chicken breast, confit red potatoes, black eyed peas, cherry tomatoes, medium boiled egg, Nero tondo radish slices and julienned carrots on mixed lettuce with red wine vinaigrette.
The Salad Bar is the place to be this Summer! Grown by our young people, prepared by our young people. Run don’t walk!
16/07/2021
Breakfast doesn’t know what hit it! Check out this deliciously hearty (peanut free) pancake bake made with and our triple berry chia seed jam! This is our whole grain remix of ‘s pancake bake 😋
29/06/2021
Meet the Dragon Bowl 🐉
A hearty warm bowl available at the Summer Salad Bar. A blend of brown and white rice as a base, with braised pac choi, roasted sesame broccoli, fresh daikon radishes, pickled cherry bell radishes, hot kimchi sauce, and firecracker tofu.
Plant based goodness to help you tap into your inner dragon.
GCYC grown produce: daikon and cherry bell radish, pac choi
18/06/2021
Grab and go service is back!
Our public grab and go service is back for the summer starting Monday 6/21. Our meals are made from-scratch, delicious, and healthy. We’re serving up lunches/suppers and breakfast meals packaged to go and ready to eat at your leisure.
Meal Service operates Monday thru Friday from 2-6pm at the GCYC Front Patio (7200 S. Ingleside Ave)
10/06/2021
We’re back! We’ve done more catering in the last few weeks than we have in the last year! The city is opening back up and folks are hungry!
Our events catering is a youth-driven enterprise. Our catering team is comprised of our teen and alumni apprentices. Each catering order is an opportunity for them to hone their skills and learn about the business-side of the culinary world. They help develop menus, prep and cook the food, conduct table service, and wash the dishes. All the profits from our catering ventures go back into the program.
Catering from GCYC is catering with a purpose!
07/05/2021
Meet the Black Bean Fajita Burger! Making its menu debut this Summer, this one took some extra time and care to get the recipe just right. Our black bean burger is made from scratch (and VEGAN!) featuring Comer-grown ingredients! Topped with sautéed fajita veggies and nacho cheese 🤤We just know you’re gonna love it, you’re body’s gonna love it, and our planet is gonna love all this plant-based goodness 💙 🌎🧡
Meal Services are FREE and operate Monday through Friday from 4:30-6:30pm at GCYC until May 27! Summer services begin June 21!
02/05/2021
May menu is now available! We have some exciting new dishes to share with you all!
Grab and Go services continue through May 27th. We’re open Monday through Friday 4:30-6:30pm 🍽
01/05/2021
We can’t believe it’s been a week since Gary’s Grocery Games! Our young chefs did an amazing job preparing their dishes and plating for the judges!
Be the first to know and let us send you an email when GCYC Culinary Department posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Want your business to be the top-listed Interior Service?
Share
We believe, good food builds community
The Culinary Department provides 4 major services to the campus: daily meal service for our members, out of school time enrichment programming, teen and young adult employment opportunities, and events catering. We approach culinary education in 2 ways: teaching cooking as a vital life skill and teaching cooking as a career path.
We offer programming for all ages that empowers participants to make healthier choices through learning to cook to nourish themselves and their families. Having the ability to feed yourself is a fundamental skill in becoming an independent young adult. On the other side of things, we have our enrichment clubs for high schoolers that focus on learning the business of cooking through entrepreneurship and social enterprise. Where teens can get their feet wet in the culinary industry with low stakes and having fun with their friends.
We hire 6 young people aged 16 to 24 annually as Culinary Apprentices to work in the kitchen and further explore Culinary Arts as a career path. Our apprentices work alongside adult career cooks and staff all of our major catering events. They're taught the business side of the operation as well by running their own weekly food service operation during the school year. Our catering operation covers everything from small lunches during a meeting, to end of year pizza parties, to 3-day 400 person conferences for external clients. It's all made possible through the Apprentice program and all proceeds are funneled back into our department operations.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were able to take all of our middle school programming online. Through Jewel Osco's grocery delivery service, students safely received a weekly grocery delivery with ingredients for the week's cook along. Each week, they tuned in via Google Hangouts to receive instruction on the week's recipes and prepare a healthy meal for themselves and their families. It was amazing to see parents, grandparents and older siblings jump in as their middle schoolers' "sous chef".
In addition to programming, our meal service model had to pivot to meet new needs and obstacles created by the pandemic and the ongoing social unrest after the murder of George Floyd. We secured approval to participate in the Summer Food Service Program as our own sponsor this Summer. This USDA-funded program allows us to serve youth under 18 two meals a day, five days a week absolutely free of charge to them. Through the help of a private donor we were also able to serve up to 50 people per day over 18 for free as well. So we not only provided free and healthy meals to our youth, but to their care takers and the young adults we had working on campus.
Our Summer Meal Service allowed us to create a hyperlocal Comer Campus food system. That means that the food we were growing in our campus gardens was being prepared and consumed on site and in the community at a rate that's more impactful than anything we've been able to do here before. Our Urban Agriculture department handed out free bags of produce twice a week to GCYC families and community members, nearly 20% of everything we grew this Summer went into our free meals. The creation of this food system allows us to combat the systemic challenges and the social determinants of health negatively impacting the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. And these challenges are here in the community all the time, they've only been exacerbated by COVID and the impacts of rioting and looting.
