William Rogers, a 30-year-old executive chef with the university’s catering service, cooked at the Masters Golf Tournament in Georgia. As an avid golf fan, Rogers said the experience was especially rewarding.
Since William Rogers began his career in restaurants just 12 years ago, he has managed to find many opportunities to cook on new turf.
The 30-year-old executive chef of Good Tidings, the university’s catering service, has jumped at the chance to fish off the coast of Maine and cook inside Oriole Park at Camden Yards. And while he meant to settle down when he took a job on this campus in August, it was just a matter of months before he sought out another kitchen – this time on a fairway.
From April 1 to 9, Rogers joined nine other chefs at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia to cook for professional golfers and spectators at the Masters Tournament. University officials and colleagues said having Rogers represent the university was an honor.
“It’s a point of pride for us,” said Dining Services spokesman Bart Hipple. “It reminds us of the quality of chefs we have working here.”
Rogers said cooking at the Masters was especially exciting because he follows professional golf.
“I like to play [golf] as often as I can but I haven’t played in a little while,” he said. “I like to practice; I like to go to the range.”
Today, Rogers oversees the Good Tidings kitchen, manages food quality and writes menus. In some ways, it is a relaxing job for a former restaurant chef, he said, which was one of the draws.
“Hotels are very tough and intense, and I liked it a lot, but it’s hard to have both,” Rogers said. “It’s hard to have a life and have a quality of food.”
His connection to food began much earlier than his employment with a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Georgia, Florida and Virginia. He began helping his mother in the kitchen when he was 3 years old and at 18, took a job as a server at Mancini’s, an Italian restaurant on Fenwick Island on the Delaware coast. While carrying menus and delivering dishes, he admired the head chef for his technique and for making everything from scratch.
From there he worked in the kitchen at Camden Yards, and then finally studied at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.
“For a guy that’s 30 years old, he’s done a lot,” said catering administrator Abbott Albright.
In one of his more unconventional experiences, Rogers said, he got to see food at its freshest: With a 2008 James Beard Foundation scholarship, he took eight days off to travel to Maine and work on a major seafood distributors’ fishing boat.
“It was really cool – we had one day where I got to break down a whole tuna,” Rogers said. “I think it was a 400-pound tuna.”
Albright said Rogers always keeps his composure and pays painstaking attention to his work.
“He approaches everything in a calm and personable level, in a profession where people have a reputation for being cantankerous and rude,” Albright said.
Resident Life Assistant Director for Housing Partnerships Dennis Passarella-George said he noticed Rogers is especially positive when they worked together to serve lunch to more than 400 guests at this year’s Student Affairs Conference.
“He was great to work with, creative, very open to feedback and the food was amazing,” Passarella-George said.
One of Rogers’ clients, mechanical engineering coordinator Joanyuan Lee, said that at the last minute, she needed to make a change in her order. Rogers personally stepped in to get the revised order to many of her 80 guests.
“The chef really helped me at that point,” Lee said. “I was quite impressed.”
Rogers said looking back over his time at the Masters, he was glad to have a chance to help the university from off the campus as well.
“I worked very hard with them, and they were happy with me, so to have the name of the university there,” he said. “It was good for me, and it was good for us.”
gray@umdbk.com
