Seconds, Anyone? UML Chef Takes Runner-Up at Cooking Competition

03/27/2023
By Ed Brennen

The slices of five-spice tri-tip steak, cooked a perfect medium-rare and adorned with a sesame chimichurri, rested on a Korean-inspired gochujang cannellini bean puree. Fried sweet soy cauliflower, arguably the star of the dish, and pickled vegetables rounded out the plate.

Stanley Szymczak, senior residential chef for University Dining, had been thinking about the dish for a month. Now, after 60 pressure-packed minutes of cooking, it was plated for three judges at the Aramark Culinary Excellence (ACE) 2023 Northeast Regional competition, held recently at Boston University.

“I’m super-competitive and I always push myself, so when I heard Aramark was doing this, I said, ‘Yeah, I want to compete,’” says Szymczak, whose dish finished second in a field of six Aramark chefs — making him the first alternate if the winning chef from BU is unable to attend this summer’s ACE national competition at the Culinary Institute of America in New York.

“I’m happy that I placed,” says Szymczak, who joined UML in 2021 after almost 14 years at the Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center in Boston. “I went against some talented chefs and got some positive feedback. Two judges told me they really enjoyed my fried cauliflower.”

Raised on fresh seafood on Long Island in New York, Szymczak earned a culinary arts degree from Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. After working in the Seaport Hotel’s restaurant for six years, he transferred to the banquet division, where he was soon plating up to 7,000 dinners at a time while working under Executive Chef Jeffrey Stone.

When Stone left to become Aramark’s district executive chef at UML in 2021, Szymczak followed.

“This was a new challenge. I had never worked in an environment like this,” says Szymczak, who spends a lot of his time planning menus for UML’s three dining commons — Fox Hall, South Campus and the UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center — where nearly 4,000 students eat each day.

“Jeff and I come from a four-diamond hotel where that expectation of quality is always up there, and we want to bring that here,” Szymczak says. 

A perfectionist, Szymczak keeps looking for ways to improve the food service.

“Unfortunately, I’m never happy. I will always find something we can improve on,” he says. “I’m never complacent.”

Szymczak had to get through the district round of the ACE competition last fall to advance to the Northeast Regional. Much like on Food Network’s “Chopped,” contestants are given a protein and a set list of ingredients — although they know what’s coming a month before the competition.

For his district dish, Szymczak “went more of an Indian route” and prepared a turmeric sea bass with a curry cauliflower gnocchi, sautéed with tomatoes and arugula. It was accompanied by bhaji, which is “like a fried onion blossom crisp,” he says.

While Szymczak enjoys competitive cooking (he participated in several “scholarship cookoffs” at his vocational high school), he’s not clamoring to appear on one of the many TV cooking shows.

“Maybe I would do ‘Chopped’ since it’s just one day, but I’m all set with the TV things,” he says.

He is looking forward to next year’s ACE competition, however.

“I’ll be back next year,” he says. “I want to win.”