It was clear from the interview that Kevin Palacios wasn’t applying for a typical restaurant job.
The first sign came from a scenario, the only culinary-related question all afternoon: imagine the burgers are burning. A chain of tickets hangs from a whirring printer. Pots clang, an oven door is slammed, a plate is spilled and someone starts to cry. Your phone begins to buzz as a line snakes out the door. An argument breaks out. Then someone lunges at you with a knife. What do you do?
“Somehow, I answered it,” Palacios said from his office at The Village Cookie Shoppe in Long Beach.
In a normal kitchen, arguments happen. As do accidents, burnt burgers and crying. But this isn’t a normal kitchen.
Since 2015, Palacios has led the kitchen and bakery run by Mental Health America of Los Angeles’ (MHALA) employment program.
The longstanding program, one of three the nonprofit offers, teaches people the skills needed to land a job in a commercial kitchen or cafe.
His staff, the budding cooks and bakers — six to eight per ‘semester’ — are the formerly jobless, homeless, incarcerated or fostered, who must arrive on time and diligently do their unheroic jobs as part of their slow crawl back into societal standing.
Those who finish are connected with a case worker who helps them enter stable employment, in kitchens and behind counters in Long Beach and Los Angeles County. About 85% of participants stay on at least 90 days at their new job, according to MHALA.
But they must first make it through the course, which picks up during the ‘cookie season,’ a five-week stint from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. In his eleventh cookie season, Palacios expects his crew to push out 27,000 orders of cookies and treats.
It’s under this increasing demand — he completed about 600 orders in his first cookie season — that makes the setting for teaching participants how to handle stress.
It also teaches them the soft skills that many take for granted: paying bills, working with others, making eye contact — things that prison or street life, with its cliques and dangers, don’t really prepare them for.
Few arenas serve better as a platform for learning this than in a commercial kitchen.
For Monday, crews had to bake and package 150 orders of cookies. There are over-the-counter sales, an ordering schedule, budget and a hefty catering order to complete. And don’t forget a box of cookies or two for the postal workers. “That’s just Monday,” Palacios said.
Cookies are sent anywhere in the nation, except Hawaii. Monday’s shipment includes a couple of boxes for Compton, a large shipment to a law firm in New York and another few to Bloomington, Ind. “I remember that guy because we talked about Hoosier football and basketball,” he said.
While no knife-wielding maniac was there to greet him upon his start, Palacios entered his first day in 2014 into a kitchen in dire straits: it was $60,000 in the hole, lacked structure and was subdued by a kitchen bully named Mitch. But it came with paid weekends off. “They suckered me in,” he joked.
Palacios wasn’t sure why the appeal has grown so rapidly for the kitchen’s mail orders – could it be their biscuit-style consistency, or their “popping” Yelp handle — yet it amounts to a large percentage of their sales.
Angelica Dicence, a seasonal baker at the shop, couldn’t really say what made the cookies such a catch, or why the program shows such success.
“I get to work with cookies all day, who doesn’t love that,” she said.
Palacios could’ve fallen into a cozier spot at the five-star Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, he said. “I had applied and I was going to get it.”
But what made him right for the job is a lesson he’s learned in the decade since: that the measure of a chef is not only in their creativity or talent with a blade but in their ability to defuse stress and teach others to do the same.
Palacios, himself a recovering alcoholic, lives by a ‘takes one to know one’ mentality, relying on his own experience to relate to people he feels have “been shunned into a corner.”
“In California, we live in such a fast lane,” Palacios said. “Everybody’s trying to fast track to what they want and nobody’s got time for people… this job has made me a better father, a better husband, it’s made me a better person.”
To learn more about the Village Cookie Shoppe, or to place an order for pick-up, click here.