Top Chefs

From September through June, more than 1,400 kids in kindergarten through eighth grade eat a free breakfast, lunch — or both — at the Island’s public schools. The featured menu items are mouthwatering: one day it could be Feijoada (a Brazilian stew of beans and sausage) at Tisbury School, sesame chicken at West Tisbury and Chilmark Schools, fajitas at Edgartown School and baked lemon chicken with a spinach salad at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School.

Who’s making this delicious food and what do their days look like? At each school there’s a culinary team of three (sometimes more) including the head chef, who navigates everything from budget constraints and federal nutrition guidelines to the ever-changing landscape of allergies and dietary restrictions. The cooks also work with generous donations from local farms, nonprofits and grocery stores. And all the while, they’re keeping their eyes on the kids (and on what they like and don’t like!) and making sure that everyone eats well.

We caught up with the hardworking women and men who cook at four Island schools — and learned why a school chef is not only a cook, but a problem solver, a friend, a teacher and much more. 

Tisbury School

Kitchen team: Head cook Melinda Maveety, assistant cooks Camila Ramsey and Janet Ponte

Number of meals served per day: 100 breakfasts, 220 lunches (kindergarten through eighth grade)

Kids’ favorite meals: Carne asada rice bowls, Feijoada

Something special: Melinda plans each month’s menu a few weeks in advance but leaves room for special menus, like shepherd’s pie for “Pi Day” or green eggs and ham for a celebration of Dr. Seuss.

 

When head cook and Island native Melinda Maveety started working at Tisbury School in 2002, she couldn’t have imagined the challenges she would face in feeding the school. Leading the culinary team through a school remediation, a global pandemic and a school renovation wasn’t easy, but settling into the brand-new kitchen and light-filled dining area in 2024 made it all worth it.

Besides a renovated space, access to ingredients has changed over the years. “When I started we got chicken in a can and salmon in a can,” Melinda said. “Now we get fresh chicken and fresh beef, and the government allows us to get fresh fruit out of our dedicated budget as opposed to canned fruits.”

And now she has the flexibility to create recipes based on changes in the student body. “In 2018 we started having a bigger Brazilian population and so we came up with a Feijoada recipe that the kids love,” she said. Observing the students’ food preferences has allowed Melinda to create meals around specific ingredients too. “Our kids are big fish kids so fish is an important part of our menu,” Melinda said, noting that in 2025 the school received 110 pounds of fluke from the Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust.

Local food programs have had a dramatic impact on her menu, Melinda said. In addition to the fish donation, the school received 1,523 pounds of donated vegetables from Island Grown Initiative (IGI) in 2025. And Slough Farm donated 730 pounds of pork and beef.

Kids also learn about local food and maintain a school garden, thanks to IGI’s Island Grown Schools program. And while the school garden is small, Melinda welcomes anything the kids glean. “One class brought us a carrot, a bean and a tiny amount of greens, but I turned it into a big pot of soup and brought it up to their classroom and they loved it,” she said with a laugh. “They are so proud of what they grow!”

With a blender for breakfast smoothies whirring in the background and Camila Ramsey chopping carrots, Melinda voiced what everyone in the kitchen feels. “It’s all about the kids,” she said. “Every day there is one kid who comes in and says, ‘This is my favorite lunch!’”

 

Edgartown School

Kitchen team: Head cook Gina deBettencourt; assistant cooks Jean Zdankowski, Jill Taney and Dan Townes; rotating substitutes (chefs from local restaurants): Anthony Rabini, Tony Saccoccia, Pat Toomey and Robin Forte

Number of meals served per day (approx.): 125 breakfasts, 325 lunches (pre-kindergarten through eighth grade)

Kids’ favorite lunches: Turkey dinner, Chinese chicken wings

Something special: The school garden is an essential part of the meal program. The peach, apple and grape jams were made from summer fruit grown in the garden, and the kitchen has a freezer of food gleaned from the garden.

 

On a typical school day, the first bus begins dropping kids off at Edgartown School at 7:30 a.m. The cafeteria doors swing open; Boston Bruins and Red Sox banners decorate the cafeteria walls along with a few thank-you cards from students. Head cook Gina deBettencourt, who has been running the kitchen since 1988, greets kids by name and sorts paperwork for lunch orders. Assistant cook Jean Zdankowski serves breakfast, and assistant cooks Jill Taney and Dan Townes prep ingredients and start the day’s soup.

Gina’s deep Island roots are evident in her ease with both students and staff. She was born and raised on the Island and attended Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, and her father attended Edgartown School. Many of the current students are children or grandchildren of her former students.

Gina credits local support for allowing the school meal program to flourish.

“The reason we are able to do what we do is because we are blessed with IGI, Morning Glory Farm and Slough Farm. They donate tons of food,” she said. Gina plans the menus two months out, incorporating donated produce and meat, fish from the Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust and produce from the garden.

A lot has changed since Edgartown School was the first on the Island to institute scratch cooking in 1989. (They also began serving breakfast long before it became a state mandate.)

“Twenty years ago, if I handed kids a bowl of chicken chili, they would say, ‘What’s that?’” Gina laughed. “Now they are open to trying new things.”

Fish is always on the menu. “We have a lot of fish here,” Gina said. “Salmon is without a doubt their favorite. We also serve flounder and cod.”

As with the other schools, students’ allergies are carefully monitored. The Edgartown cafeteria has a dedicated “allergy line” where one cook hands a lunch to each child.

The team also creates a special meal on October 12 for Children’s Day, a holiday in Brazil. What started out ten years ago as one special meal has turned into an annual school event. “The parents come in and help us cook and the kids love it and appreciate it,” Gina said.

Ultimately, for Gina, the cafeteria is so much more than just food on a plate. “I want to believe that everyone strives to make the kids as comfortable as they possibly can,” she said. “Because you never know what is going on in someone’s life at any given time. Sometimes it’s not about the food — it’s about how you’re handing it out.”

 

Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School

Kitchen team: Head cook Betsy Carnie, assistant cooks Ann Khoan and Jenik Khelalfa

Number of meals served per day (approx.): 40 breakfasts, 100 snacks, and 110 lunches (pre-kindergarten through high school)

Kids’ favorite flavors: Cumin, fresh ginger, fresh lime

Something special: To connect kids with food, Betsy brings high school students into the kitchen. Once a week, interested students join the team to help prep, cutting leftover pita bread to make pita chips or slicing leftover bread for croutons. Kids are also welcome to come by whenever they need a break.

 

Embracing seasonal and mostly local ingredients, minimizing waste and using food as an educational tool are at the heart of the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School’s meal program. While Betsy Carnie, Ann Khoan and Jenik Khelalfa create a monthly breakfast and lunch menu, the finished dishes depend on what is available that week — or even that day.

The underlying philosophy of the program is scratch cooking. “Everything is made from scratch,” said Betsy, who has a background in curriculum design. “We are definitely going for quality over quantity.”

Making use of donated local food is a major part of the team’s meal planning. “One week Slough Farm donated a ton of breakfast sausage, so we did sausage with scrambled eggs, using eggs from Native Earth Teaching Farm,” Betsy said. Another day a case of overripe organic bananas was donated and transformed into banana bread for the day’s upper-grade snack. Loaves of day-old bread donated by Beetlebung Farm are sliced and served with lunch. Some donations are more unexpected: Island grocery stores have mispicks (short for mistaken and picked up) — items that get sent to a grocery store accidentally by the distributor.

“Haraldo [Nascimento] at Up-Island Cronig’s calls us all the time with mispicks,” Betsy said. Items range from cartons of salad greens to crates of oranges, and the team works with all of it.

Seasonality is key to their recipes: Betsy pointed to a shelf of Island-grown butternut squash and said, “We’re still eating butternut squash and it’s almost April!” Ann, who co-owns a catering company and was a chef in Brooklyn before joining the charter school in 2025, loves cooking seasonally. “[As a society] we’ve gotten away from being in tune with seasonal fruit and vegetables and students might not have the opportunity to eat that way at home,” Ann said as she peeled a tray of steamed Island-grown beets. Introducing new flavors is what Jenik, who is the former co-owner of Little House Café, enjoys about cooking at the charter school. “I was struck by the varieties of the foods the kids eat, and we make it fun for them to try new things,” she said.

Educating kids about the source of their food and the broader impact of their choices is Betsy’s passion. To reduce waste, milk is poured from large cartons and served in upcycled glass jars rather than served in single-serve cartons.

One morning, dates were on the breakfast menu as part of a discussion of Ramadan at the school’s morning meeting, because dates are eaten to break the fast.

“We want to make the food relevant to the bigger picture,” Betsy said.

 

The Up-Island Regional School District  

(West Tisbury School and Chilmark School)

 

Kitchen team: Head chef Mercedes Johnson, assistant cooks Peter Smyth and Codrin Creanga, assistant food service helper Doug Sabin, assistant food service helper and accounts specialist Susie Bologna

Number of meals served per day (approx.): 12 breakfasts and 60 lunches for Chilmark School; 50 breakfasts and 250 lunches for West Tisbury

Kids’ favorite meals: Pizza, chicken noodle soup

Something special: Mercedes oversees meals for two schools. Codrin is in charge of the Chilmark School lunch. Every day at 10 a.m. he packs the meals and transports them in a temperature-controlled van to Chilmark School, sets up the meal service line and serves the kids. After lunch he cleans, packs up and returns to West Tisbury School.

 

“Hey you! Oatmeal for breakfast?” That’s Mercedes Johnson greeting a child walking into the West Tisbury School cafeteria at 8 a.m. on a recent day, the clang of metal bowls and saucepans echoing in the background. Assistant cook Peter Smyth was busy startings the day’s soup while assistant cook Codrin Creanga sliced strawberries and red peppers.Mercedes continued to chat and take the order sheets from teachers and kids to begin the day’s meal count.

“I like to have relationships with the kids,” Mercedes said. “I like to know what they do after school and interact with them. I’ll ask them about their lives: Where did you go on vacation? How’s your new dog?”

Mercedes moved to the Island in 2012 to take an assistant cook position at West Tisbury School. Then she became the head cook at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School before returning to West Tisbury in 2023. But her Island roots run deep. Her father was born and raised here, and she was born on the Vineyard (though raised in California). After years of working in San Francisco as a pastry chef and nanny and owning her own pastry shop, she wanted to return to the Vineyard. “It was such a great intersection of things that I love: kids and cooking, and I could bake when I wanted,” she said.

Mercedes balances allergies and taste preferences when creating the menus one year out. Allergies are a particular concern; based on conversations with other school chefs, Mercedes said that they have more alpha-gal than other schools.

Daily menus have a specific theme. Monday is pasta and Tuesday features a world cuisine, for example. A homemade soup, a salad bar, a hot item and an alternative (usually sunflower butter and jelly sandwiches) are served every day. While Mercedes has seen a shift in kids’ palates in her years as a school cook, “kids are kids,” she said with a laugh. “I serve chicken on a bone and I tell them ‘this chicken does not have fingers.’”

Incorporating local food donations of vegetables, fish and meat influences the finished dishes, as does using leftover ingredients to minimize food waste. In 2025, the UIRSD received 1,759 pounds of fresh produce from IGI. “In September and October I have beautiful local tomatoes and we really try to make use of them!” she said.

Having the kids sit down to eat is what Mercedes feels most passionate about, taking her lunch break to sit with the kids.

“I find there isn’t a lot of sit-down family dinner,” she said. “I think this is one of the only times they sit down to eat together in groups.”

 

Laura Holmes Haddad is a former cookbook editor and regular contributor to The Vine.

 

Editor’s note: The Oak Bluffs Elementary School chefs were unavailable to be interviewed for this story.

This article appears in Spring Home & Garden – 2026.