Harvard may not breed many famous cooks, but at least two people on campus are using its dining halls as a launch pad to reinvent their futures. One is a grill cook who works here to kill the demons of his past. The other is Harvard’s youngest dining hall general manager, admired by students who have no idea that she’s a business prodigy.
Both are under 33 years of age, and both are milking the parallel universe of culinary services at Harvard for all it’s worth. And while you’re eating grilled chicken, both of them might be getting a little closer to achieving everything they’ve dreamed of.
‘WHERE EVERYBODY’S NOT F’ED UP ON SOMETHING’
Barry Mauger has a tattoo.
It consists of a few colored stripes, weaving around his wrist, and the following words: “The Sounds of Silence.”
“It helped me while I was going through a lot of stuff,” he says of the Simon and Garfunkel song from which the tattoo derives its inscription. In the clamor of one of the largest Houses on campus, he’s still searching for that modest goal of tranquility and peace.
Mauger is 32 years old. He works 32 hours per week as a grill cook for Quincy House. His hair is black and slick; his voice is low and measured. He’s not like Paul Simon at all. If anything, he evokes a young Marlon Brando—thoughtful, charismatic, and more than a little frightening when he describes the life he left behind.
Mauger, a child of what he describes as “a screwed-up family,” grew up in Allston. He remembers “a lot of friends dying of heroin overdoses, having kids when they’re, like, 15. I sat there looking, and thinking, ‘This is ridiculous.’”
School was not an escape. “I’m not good at school at all,” he says, “because that’s going at someone else’s pace, and I don’t do that well.”
Instead, he started working odd jobs in his teens, primarily to “take control of my life and, you know, do what I gotta do to get out of it.”
“I’ve done plumbing, I’ve done carpentry, I’ve done roofing,” he says. “But culinary is the first place I’ve been into where everybody’s not f’ed up on something.” Voice full of disgust and regret, he describes a former roofing boss who, high on cocaine, smashed his fingers in a gearbox on the job.
After working a few small restaurant jobs, including a chef gig at Cambridge’s Chez Henri, Mauger says he decided he needed more stability. “I didn’t make enough for health coverage,” he recalls. So, that was that.
In 2002, he showed up at the Winthrop Street offices of Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) because he’d heard that they offered robust benefits. Three months later, Mauger got hired.
He enjoys his job, but makes one thing clear: cooking may have turned his life around, but it’s just a means to an end.
“I do not want to be cooking my whole life,” he says.
Indeed, he can’t stop talking about all the other projects he’s working on. He sings in a rock group called “Foxhole Etiquette.” He moonlights at a burger joint, where he’s shooting to become assistant manager. He also says he’s working on a website to “promote local music,” and wants to teach himself the necessary programming skills in the next six months.
All these goals come back to the dream of personal stability. “I wanna have kids by the time I’m 35,” he says. For that, he needs to “have security first,” whether from music, web design, or food management.
In the meantime, he does his part to minimize kitchen drama. With total deadpan, he explains his techniquefor dealing with fights between other cooks: “They’ll start getting really heated over something that started over nothing, so I’ll do some goofy dance in front of them. I don’t want to be working in that atmosphere.”
It seems out of character, but really, it’s a survival technique. “My whole past when I was a kid, it was horrible and horrifying,” he says, “and I do not want that in my future.”
He doesn’t socialize much with students, but it’s not out of resentment.
“When I look at these kids, it’s kind of like the life I would like to have. I have to go in my own direction, because of my past,” he says. “But in general, I think it’s great that they’re taking advantage of what’s offered to them. I see a lot of people who don’t, and that really irritates the hell out of me.”
‘CREATING SOME CHATTER’
Two weeks ago, a mysterious love letter appeared in the Currier House Dining Hall.
Scrawled across a HUDS “Feedback Card” were these words: “I am madly in love with both of you, Currier Dining Hall, and the food it provides. Will you marry me?”
The author? Unknown, according to Currier Dining Hall General Manager Amy Lester, to whom the letter was addressed. (Patricia Machado, one of Lester’s employees, was also a recipient, but she declined to comment.)
Lester seems amused by the whole affair, but in the end it’s strictly business. She has a dining hall to run, a career to build, and a reputation to maintain. She doesn’t have time to act her age.
For the record, she’s 26. In four short years, she’s risen through the ranks to become HUDS’s youngest general manager.
“As a general rule, I try not to mention my age,” she says hesitantly. “Sometimes, when people ask me, I say, ‘Yeah, I’m 18’—it’s kind of like, they know I’ve been working here for years, so they know I’m not 18, so I try to make a joke out of it, because it doesn’t matter.”
What does matter is the amount of work she does. As general manager, she oversees the entire spectrum of dining hall operations, from budgets to staff relations to food allergy accommodation. She works a minimum of 50 hours a week.
HUDS Director for Human Resources Judith Della Barba listed Lester first when asked to name employees under 30 destined for greater futures outside of Harvard.
“She worked her way into running Currier House,” she says.
Born in Brooklyn, Lester went to SUNY-Plattsburgh as an undergrad, earning a degree in Restaurant, Hotel, and Tourism Management. In the summers, she worked at her old summer camp.
By 19, she was managing its entire kitchen staff—20 people, 18 of whom had a limited grasp of English.
In her senior year, she did a marketing study for national food-service conglomerate Sodexho-Marriott on why college students don’t use their dining halls. She managed to land a position at HUDS just three months after graduation—Food Service Manager for Eliot and Kirkland. Last January, she was promoted to oversee Currier.
Lester is personable, slightly geeky, and unassuming. But even in conversation, she has a subtle knack for managerial tact. She almost tells a story about a massive crisis at Currier. But then she pauses. “I’m past it,” she says, calmly. “I enjoy what I do.”
She’s taking an international business class at the Extension School that uses business school case studies, and as much as she loves her co-workers and superiors, she doesn’t see herself working here 20 years from now. “I’m not actively seeking anything, but I’m not actively avoiding anything, either,” she says without a trace of hubris.
Lester, like Mauger, seems to understand that she exists in a parallel universe to the students she serves—one where the intangible Harvard name doesn’t give either of them any boost towards professional or personal success. But Harvard is giving them something.
Four years ago, after interviewing with HUDS, Lester was on a train when her mom called to tell her she’d gotten a call—from Harvard. “I was like, ‘No way!’” she recalls. It wasn’t an admission letter, and it wasn’t going to get her an A.B.. But then again, not everybody who leaves Harvard for bigger and better things leaves with a degree.
