GRANBY — For the last five years, Granby Junior Senior High School kitchen staffer Kathy Berger served as the “lunch lady at the post office.”
As soon as the food supply began to dwindle at the school, Berger would run across the parking lot to East Meadow Elementary School next door to pick up lunch food prepped that morning. She’d lug 40-pound storage boxes and totes of food back to the junior-senior high school, where they would be unloaded and served to students out of a classroom.
“It may have been cold, it may have been snowing, it may have been raining, but every hour and a half, I would leave and go out and go back and forth,” Berger said.
But on Tuesday morning, Berger did not have to haul any prepared food from school building to school building. Instead, she stayed indoors cooking in the newly renovated and reopened kitchen at the junior senior high school. After five years, she was no longer the kitchen’s runner.
“It’s amazing,” Berger said. “It’s a big change. It’s a lot of creating new habits, you know, because I was doing things a certain way for a long time, but it’s coming along very well.”
The school’s kitchen closed on March 13, 2020, the same day the school closed down to stop the spread of COVID and switched to remote learning. But when students returned the following year, the kitchen never reopened. Ventilation requirements for kitchens changed during the pandemic, and the building’s old system did not qualify.
So staff had to do their cooking at East Meadow Elementary School’s kitchen with its modern ventilation system.
“It was the challenge, for sure,” Director of Dining Services Ken LePage said. “That kitchen set up is just for an elementary so it’s very small, and to bring in another production kitchen was tough. We’re basically serving two schools out of one kitchen.”
On opening day on Tuesday, staff cooked chicken soup, rice bowls and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. In that old serving room — the classroom LePage calls a “closet” — the school community celebrated with an ice cream sundae bar complete with multiple flavors and toppings. Students filed into the lunch line, excited to discover the different meal options.
The kitchen renovations costed more than $600,000, double the initial estimates made in June 2021. Director of Finance & Operations Todd Dorman said the new ventilation systems extends throughout the cafeteria, kitchen, weight room and wrestling room. The project included duct work, an air handling unit, a roof top unit, a new hood system in the kitchen with fire suppression and abatement of original hood system.
The new kitchen will allow the school to expand its food options for students since it’s no longer restrained by size and capacity of an elementary school kitchen, LePage said.
Head Chef Doug Quinlan once walked these halls as a student, and now the 1975 graduate has returned to the building as part of his retirement. He spent his first day on Sept. 12 helping Berger bring over food, but now he uses his extensive experience in private kitchens and catering to cook high quality buffet-style dishes.
“Everything is going to be fresh,” Quinlan said. “All our timing of the food is much better. It’s safer food too, because it’s going from the ovens to the kettle to the line.”
But mostly staff were excited to return to the kitchen and serve food without the previous hassle.
“I think that this is amazing. I’m so glad our kitchen is open again,” kitchen staff member Erica Barnes said.