—Patrick Lobbes, Food Business Management
Major: Bachelor’s Degree in Food Business Management
Campus: Hyde Park, NY
Hometown: Zeeland, MI
How did you become interested in your major?
When I was a child growing up, my grandparents would visit me when I didn’t have school and my parents were both working. At lunchtime I would always help her make lunch; more often than not it was Kraft Mac & Cheese. When I became a teenager I discovered the Food Network on a Sunday morning. The first person I saw was Giada and I remember her making rigatoni with butternut squash and shrimp. Immediately I wanted to try and make that. From then on, I kept watching the Food Network to get some recipes to try for my family. Soon I was designated the duty of making dinner for my family because I was always the first one home from school.
Summer of freshman year in high school, I got a job at a small fried chicken operation that shared space with a gas station. It was then I decided that the culinary field was a possibility for me. My junior year of high school, I decided to spend part of my day at the local technical school and participate in the culinary and pastry arts program. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t want to go to the tech center and learn something new from my chefs. After school, I would make dinner, do my homework, and then browse the Internet to learn as much as I could about food. I watched videos of Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller, Raymond Blanc, Grant Achatz, Rene Redzepi, Ferran Adria, Anthony Bourdain, and many others like them. I did that every night for two years, absorbing as much as I possibly could. ” href=”https://www.ciachef.edu/why-study-at-the-cia/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>reasons to come to the CIA.
What do you like best about the CIA?
I enjoy the instructors the most because not only are they prevalent on campus and up-to-date with food trends and ideas, they push students to do more than just their best and help them succeed. ” href=”https://www.ciachef.edu/grant-achatz/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Grant Achatz, Michael Voltaggio, ” href=”https://www.ciachef.edu/cat-cora/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Cat Cora, ” href=”https://www.ciachef.edu/roy-choi/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Roy Choi, and many others are graduates of this school. They all came to the CIA to become great chefs and wanted to put in the work to get to where they are.