For someone who isn’t yet 25 years old, Travis High School’s chef-instructor Olivia Balderrama has packed a great deal of experience into her life. As a Bowie High School junior, she enrolled in the school’s culinary program and realized immediately what she wanted to do with her life. “I always loved to cook, my grandmother encouraged and inspired me, but I hadn’t known that cooking could be a career. The program at Bowie opened my eyes to that.”
A previously indifferent scholar, Balderrama became motivated to do well in her other classes because it would help her culinary career. She credits Patricia Bell (Bowie’s culinary instructor for 10 years, now a career specialist at AISD) as her primary inspiration, helping her find and pursue opportunities, focus her energies, and realize her goals. She says, “Ms. Bell is my lifetime mentor. I wish every student could have a teacher like her.”
While still in high school, Balderrama worked for a year and a half with chef Peter Wabble at Hot Jumbo Bagel and the Omni Hotel. In 1995, they were named Bowie’s Mentor and Mentoree of the Year. She also worked for two years with Austin chef Steve Mannion, a longtime Bowie culinary mentor. Following high school graduation in 1996, Balderrama spent four years at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, R.I., obtaining an associate’s degree in culinary arts and a BA in food service management. By the time she was a sophomore, she was on the dean’s list and working as a teaching assistant. She spent a summer apprenticed to chef/author Patricia Quintanilla at her school in Mexico City, where Balderrama prepped for and assisted in classes, and worked on recipe development and English translation for one of Quintanilla’s books.
After graduating with honors from Johnson and Wales, Balderrama was hired as a corporate management trainee by the Park Hyatt Hotel in New York City. At the ripe old age of 23, she was a food and beverage manager for the toney hotel on Fifth Avenue, supervising 200 people.
Nonetheless, when the position opened in AISD’s brand-new Travis Institute, Balderrama didn’t hesitate to leave New York and return to her hometown, where she began working as the Institute’s chef-instructor in 2001.
“I always figured I’d become a culinary teacher when I got tired of working in the industry, but the opportunity came along a lot sooner than I expected,” she says. “I really want to give back to the students at Travis what Ms. Bell and the Bowie program gave to me. It can be hard to focus on the future when you’re in high school; everything seems so immediate and so dramatic. I’m young enough to remember what that’s like, and my goal is to help students see the possibilities beyond here and now.”
“Yeah, sometimes I miss the excitement of New York City, but that’s okay, I’m here and I love it. This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
This article appears in October 11 • 2002.
