Staff Profile: Cheyenne Vazquez, Kitchen Manager
Staff Cheyenne (on left) and Teen Leader Esther (on right) cleaning up onion skins.
Welcome to a new space specifically dedicated to learning more about Ceres and our mission in new and creative ways. My name is Esther Luvishis, and I’ve volunteered at Ceres for around 2-1/2 years. I’m a Teen Leader and Board Member. Thought these different positions, I’ve been fortunate enough to see another side of Ceres and am super excited to get the chance to share with you all how beautiful Ceres is, inside and out. Through this blog - Bloom: Ceres Community Chronicles - I hope to do just that.
For our very first installment, I had the opportunity to sit down with Cheyenne Vazquez, Ceres’ Kitchen Manager to learn more about his background.
How did you hear about Ceres?
“I volunteered at Ceres when it was very small, in 2007, just when they first started in Sebastopol. This was back when the kitchen was in a church. I grew up on Florence Avenue right down the street… and was friends with Julie Stuffelbeam, one of the early volunteers (who is still involved as our second longest serving staff members). Because I was a friend of a friend, I got pulled into the program, and volunteered there for 7 months.”
What did you do after high school?
“I took a gap year, traveled, [to] Thailand and India mainly, backpacked around there. Then I came back and had to figure out what it was that I was going to be doing. I did EMT classes, became an EMT, and decided after a couple months that I didn’t want to do that. One of the other friends that was in Ceres back when I started, had started doing restaurant work. She [told me that I] should just go work in a restaurant. So, then I went and got a job at a food truck in South SF, called MoBowl. It was an Asian Fusion food truck run by two young guys just trying to start a business. And I was getting paid 11 dollars an hour, driving from here to South SF, so that was a year of commuting. It was a crazy, crazy year, that I have little memories of because of how much driving I did. But, it gave me a year of work experience to then go apply to other restaurants. Then my friend (the one that initially told me to get into restaurant work) was working at Zazu at the time, and they told me to go check in at Fork Roadhouse because they had just opened that new branch in Sebastopol. I got the job there in February of 2015. All this is without culinary school, I just was determined. I went from being a prep chef/dishwasher to being a line cook to then co-managing for a while. At the end, I was managing the catering side of the business.”
Why did you stop?
“I stopped because COVID started. That lines up with 2020 March, and also it was time. I had been there for a long time. After 5 years, it was my time to say goodbye. They closed for 3 months during COVID, and then I saw an associate chef job in Sebastopol. I knew [Ceres], and I went to the interview and got hired!”
What is your biggest Strength?
“My strength is talking to people and creating a good workspace for folks as much as I can. I’ve always said lift the boats so that people can do what they're supposed to be doing because they’re good at it. You should never think that you need to teach someone to do everything and expect them to do everything. You should look at what their strengths are and try to put them in a spot so they can do what they’re good at, and you find the next person who fills the spot that you yourself were filling before. So that’s always a strength, the ability to organize and make people feel seen and valued.”
How has Ceres shaped you as a person?
“It’s done a lot in terms of how I think of myself as something other than line cook. I never managed people before, and I am still learning all this stuff as I go. My experience at Ceres has reinforced that managing people is the biggest thing that I seek to be good at. Because I am good at talking to people, and inspiring them to feel like they’re a part of something. By leading by example, I’ve learned that management is a viable career path for me. I can do this!”
Do you have any advice?
“It depends what you’re looking for. I love food for people. I like bringing people together with food. I like making food too, but I'm not a fancy chef. I would say the one thing that is very true, is doing an incredibly hard job like working in a kitchen in the real world even if it really sucks is a good way of forming your understanding of how the real world really works. I was a really shy person before I worked in a kitchen and then I got broken by the system. It’s not always good, but I feel like it serves a valuable purpose.”
Parting words:
“I hope that long into the future, Ceres continues to be what it promised to be in the beginning, and that we can be a living healthy community that produces a lot of food for people that need it.”
Hopefully you learned a little more about Cheyenne! We can’t wait to see what else he does here at Ceres! Keep on the lookout for the next installment of Bloom: Ceres Community Chronicles, and until then stay happy and healthy.
Esther