When I was in fifth grade, I was a member of the Mount Prospect Elementary School student council, and I had an obsession with our school lunches. I remember bringing up how much I disliked Mount Prospect’s cafeteria lunches to nearly every single student council meeting. In fact, I even started a petition with a fellow student over the school lunch: we protested that despite meeting nutritional standards, our school lunch was disappointingly unappetizing. The mac and cheese was bland as styrofoam, the mini-pancakes came in weird plastic packaging, and the meatloaf was oddly…green? We received about 90 signatures out of the 110 students in our grade in support of our petition. I remember then bringing our petition to a student council meeting. The vice principal at the time was impressed with our numbers, but if memory serves me right, very little change occurred in the cafeteria despite our protest. That memory still strikes an indignant chord with me every time it happens to resurface. 

Now, however, as a junior at Ridge High School, my sentiment towards my school cafeteria is vastly different. Literally every single school day since September of 2022, I have eaten a meal prepared and cooked by Ridge’s school cafeteria. But I have never found a reason to protest. Instead, I have honestly, genuinely, enjoyed nearly every single meal that I have purchased here. From (actually seasoned!) mac and cheese to warmly toasted sandwiches, from bulging tacos to sausage pasta, from Mediterranean chicken bowls to plates of hot buffalo wings—I am of the opinion that Ridge’s school cafeteria goes above and beyond to not only satisfy our nutritional needs, but to also serve our diverse tastes and desires. I can feel my ten-year-old self’s indignation with her elementary school cafeteria healing every time I dig into a meal here at Ridge High School.

Therefore, to better understand and recognize the service that our school cafeteria provides for our 1,600+ strong student body every day, I spoke with Mr. Matamoros, the food service director here at Ridge. Read on to learn more about his work for the Ridge community, his passion for cooking, and what he calls a “Vegetable Day!”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Anya: Firstly, can you please introduce yourself?

Mr. Matamoros:  My name is Gill Matamoros. 

Anya: If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?

Mr. Matamoros: Mac and cheese. It’s a comfort food. I can have it anytime of the day, anytime of the year.

Anya: Yeah, I like it too. 

Mr. Matamoros: If I make it. That’s the trick. I don’t like mac and cheese from the box. By trade, I was a chef all of my life. So that’s why I don’t eat fast food, I don’t eat McDonald’s or anything like that. When it comes to food, if I make it or if somebody makes it and I can see it, then yes. But Mac and cheese is the answer. 

Anya: What draws you to your job? Is there something about schools or the cafeteria that you particularly love?

Mr. Matamoros: I love food. I have a pet passion for cooking. If there’s anything about food, we can talk for hours. And then something I like about schools is the challenge. I’ve worked in hospitals, hotels, I’ve worked in all parts of the industry. But when I came into schools it was different because a lot of people here—not everybody, though—they were just starting to learn about food. For example, when I came here the menu was very simple: it was just your regular burgers, chicken tenders, and french fries. I’ve been here shy of three years, and when I first came in, I said that I would change the menu. And then what we did was I actually turned this into kind of like a food court. If you look at the menu now, it changes every day. One day you have Jamaican, one day you have Indian. It is never the same. So that is one thing that I like. 

Anya: Yeah, I’ve noticed that the menu is different each day.

Mr. Matamorors: I got that from working in hospitals. When I used to work in hospitals, people hated hospital food. So then I decided, you know what? We should change the food into something that people will actually eat, not just “hospital food.” So when I was working in Jersey Shore Medical Center, we were giving the patients filet mignon and shrimp. 

Anya: Yeah. Wow. 

Mr. Matamoros: Which is very odd because usually you don’t get that in the hospital. Here, it’s different because now I have a budget, so because of the budget, there’s only so much that I can do or I can spend or I can charge. But if I still stay within the amount of money that I can use, that’s how I can turn it around. That’s one of the parts that I find as a challenge: if you wanted to do a particular type of food, how can you incorporate it so that it’s still available to the students and it doesn’t cost a ton of money? 

Anya: What does your day-to-day look like? Does each day follow a routine? 

Mr. Matamoros: Every day is different. We have the high school, the middle school, and the four elementary schools, and I oversee all the schools. And the menu here is different from the middle school’s, and that menu is different from elementary school’s. What happens is, for example, if the provider for the food came here but didn’t come to the elementary school, how are we going to move the food around? Or how do we change our recipe? Or a lot of times it’s the staff, where sometimes you are a cashier here, but tomorrow you’re gonna be a cook somewhere else. So it changes from day to day. 

Anya: What is your favorite part of your job?

Mr. Matamoros: I get to meet different people every day. I like to build relationships. I know a lot of people by face now. A lot of them I already know by name, and it becomes like a friendship. Like now that you’ve come in I know what you look like, and that’s pretty much how I work it out from there. 

Anya: Yeah, definitely. If a Ridge student wanted to obtain a job like yours in the future, what are some qualifications or experiences that they’d need to gain?

Mr. Matamoros: I’ll say…you have to respect food if you’re going to become a chef. It doesn’t have to be necessarily in the school—you can work at a restaurant, hospital, anywhere. Forget the TV part. Not everybody’s going to be a TV chef. For example, what I do now is the accounting part, where I do all the numbers and figure out prices. But when I pass the door, now I become a chef. So now I have to know recipes and follow recipes and you educate yourself. To me it’s different: because of my background, I know diets as well, because in the hospital you have to watch exactly what you serve or what you do. And that’s what I’m saying about respect for food. If you are allergic to something, for example, I have to make sure that some ingredients….I’ll give you an example. Thai food, right? I love Thai food. But if you like Pad Thai, Pad Thai uses fish sauce when you make it. And the fish sauce is made with the shells of the shrimp. But the sauce will not tell you that it has shrimp. I’m allergic to shrimp. So you could kill somebody without even wanting to do it just because you don’t listen to the recipe. So that’s what I mean by respect for food.

Anya: What do you recommend students to buy for a well-balanced, healthy meal?

Mr. Matamoros: Here, they can buy everything. I think it’s a mixture of everything. All the food that we make for the most part is 90% cooked from scratch. The rice is made from scratch, the chicken is cooked from scratch. Everything, even the seasoning, everything we make from scratch—it’s not that we just open a bag and put it in there. Chicken tenders and french fries—yes, they have to come frozen, but for the most part, everything that we do—Indian food, we actually make, we actually get the spices and we put it together. 

Anya: How does the cafeteria choose what to serve its students? For instance, I’ve always noticed a diverse selection of foods, such as acai, Indian cuisine, or Jamaican cuisine.

Mr. Matamoros: I wanted to turn the menu into something that is not always the same. You don’t need to eat the same thing every day—if you come in today and you want to have pizza, you have pizza, but tomorrow you’ll want to have something else. So the idea is to have more variety. For next year, for example, if I’m still here, I want to do sushi.

Anya: Oh, wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. 

Mr. Matamoros: But the thing is, in some schools, you’re not allowed to serve fish, because of allergies. But you can still do vegetable rolls. That’s what I like about the whole thing: if you want to do something, turn it into something, then people will actually eat it. 

Anya: What are some things that the cafeteria does to maintain the quality of its food? For instance, are there regular inspections or safety checks?

Mr. Matamoros: We get two inspections a year. At the beginning of the school year which is usually around the first week of September, the health department will come in. They’ll come in and they check everything. They check the temperature of the water, this machine, the cold water, that there’s no holes in the wall…there’s a lot of things that the inspection checks here. And then comes the permits, the licenses, everything. They also check if there is an exterminator—all that stuff. It’s a lot of inspections that we go through along with the school. For example, two days ago the fire department came in. The health department was here in March. If we were to change something up, knock a wall down and change it, they have to come in and do it again. 

Anya: What are some options for vegetarian or gluten-free students in the cafeteria? For instance, Ridge has a diverse student body, and some of us have certain dietary restrictions or desires.

Mr. Matamoros: I try to accommodate as much as I can to everybody. For example, I have cases where parents called me and said, look, my son can only have this or that. And we do have gluten-free products like cookies, brownies, pizza, pasta, and gluten free wraps. So if you tell me that you can only eat gluten-free—I can work it out with you. You will have a different meal every day—as long as I know. We don’t make it to be ahead of the time only because I don’t want to make it just to throw it out—I hate wasting food. But that’s what we do. If a student comes in and lets us know, we can work it out from there. 

Anya: Yeah. That’s good to know. If students have suggestions or changes they’d like to voice to the cafeteria, is there a way for them to do that?

Mr. Matamoros: I’m always open. Anybody who wants to come in and ask me, “Can we do this?” or “Can we do that?” I’m more than happy to listen to them. I mean, let’s think about it. You guys are my customers. You are more important than anybody to me. So if you tell me, look, we want to eat this, we want to eat that—I can meet you halfway or we can figure out how we can do it. For example, last year I wanted to do desserts—we never had desserts here before. So last year I remember I asked a couple of students what they would like, and one girl said cannolis. So we did cannolis that next Wednesday. We don’t do it all the time—but I try to now that we have it. Now, I’ll try to have cheesecakes or red velvet cakes in the cafeteria. Another example: the acai bowls. When we set it up, I first had to check the market to see how much it would cost us to do. So I asked, say, five or six students, how much should we charge for an acai bowl? And then everybody came out with numbers, and they came out to about $7.50. That’s how it started. But then the student body president Joseph came in, and he goes, “Some of the students are wondering if you can drop the price.” So we changed the size. We gave a little less, but we still sold it. So that’s how we do it. I’ll work with you guys if anybody comes and tells me “I want to have this” or “Can we do that?”. Now I hear the latest is bagels, and we got the bagels, and then they wanted to toast it, and we got the toasters. Anything you guys want to me is fine. It makes my life easier by listening to you guys. 

Anya: Random, fun question: if you could be a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?

Mr. Matamoros: I have no idea. If this was a question to you, what would you be?

Anya: I’d be a tomato. 

Mr. Matamoros: Why? 

Anya: I have no idea. 

Mr. Matamoros: See. Okay. So since this is all in fun’s name: I work, pretty much, seven days a week. I work five days a week in here, and then when I get out of here, a lot of times I go home and I do a lot of paperwork, and on Saturdays and Sundays, a lot of the times I still bring work from here to go home to do it there. And when I’m not doing this, the hospitals also call me up for recipes—I don’t get paid, it’s more like volunteer work, but I work along with the kitchens, right? But once a month I call it a “Vegetable Day.” So once a month I call all my friends and that day, I don’t do anything. It’s a “Vegetable Day.” I get up, I eat breakfast, I watch TV. It’s a “Don’t Do Anything Day.”

Anya: Do you have a message you’d like to leave for Ridge students? 

Mr. Matamoros: To students, I always say this: whatever you’re going to do, whether you’re graduating next year or this year or whenever, whatever you’re going to choose to do, do it because you really like it, because you want to have passion for it. You want to do something where people remember you for that. Today, you can be anything you want, but if you don’t really love what you do, you’ll be miserable all your life. 

Anya: Yeah. That’s a great message. 

Mr. Matamoros: If you have any other questions or something that you don’t understand, you can just stop by. 

Anya: Okay. Yeah. Thank you so much for a great interview!