Those Who Keep Frat Boys Fed

At Phi Kappa Tau, Don Celentano meticulously cleans a meat slicer while six 3-foot loaves of garlic bread toast in the oven. One brother walks in and prepares himself a peanut butter, honey and banana sandwich as an appetizer for the pasta dinner Celentano is preparing; other brothers wander in and out of the small but pristine kitchen.

These are typical afternoons for the three fraternity chefs, who work full time preparing three meals a day for their patrons.

“It’s the best cooking job in Ithaca,” said Birnbaum. “There are regular hours, and you get to develop relationships with the guys you’re feeding. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Most of the fraternities and sororities on campus employ a full time chef to cook meals for brothers. Though the hours and compensation vary greatly, most chefs are paid in the range of what a restaurant chef would make, as well as full employee benefits. Some fraternities such as Tau Kappa Epsilon and Alpha Epsilon Pi on North Campus “share” chefs with each other, and the chefs split their time cooking for the two houses. Also, many chefs move from one fraternity at Cornell to another over the course of their careers. Celentano alone has worked for more than four fraternities in the 18 years he has worked as a fraternity chef at Cornell.

Some chefs even live in the fraternities they cook for. Travis Ferrell worked as a chef at Cornell fraternities, including Alpha Sigma Phi (Rockledge) and Alpha Zeta, for nine years before leaving last spring. During most of those years, he lived in the fraternity houses.

“I had to get in so early every morning to clean, that it was almost necessary for me to live in,” Ferrell said. [1]Feeding the masses: Phi Sigma Kappa chef Arthur Birnbaum prepares dinner for the brothers of the fraternity.

Each chef largely controls the kitchen he or she works in, and conditions vary greatly in each kitchen as a result. At Lambda Chi Alpha, the kitchen is almost immaculate while the chef, Etienne Merle ’69, prepares dinner alone for the brothers.

No matter how clean the kitchen, however, each chef has encountered his or her share of interesting stories in their time spent in the fraternities.

One chef told of the time he came into work to find his cooking table covered completely in Saran wrap. Not thinking twice, he cleared the plastic wrap, cleaned the table and continued to cook.

“I discovered later,” he said, “that the wrap had been placed so that a brother and his girlfriend could f--- on the counter the night before.”

Birnbaum lamented the time that he was cooking breakfast and liquid started dripping from the ceiling. The liquid was stale beer, dripping through the floor above from a party the previous night. Months later, another fraternity stole the meat slicer from the kitchen as a prank.

“It makes it hard to cook,” said Birnbaum. “But they are college kids, and I just want to take care of them when I cook for them. And eventually we got the slicer back.”

Celentano spoke of times that he was present for different fraternity pledge rituals.

“I’ve seen an 18-year-old man hanging by a rope off of a 300-foot cliff,” he said about the pledge process of an unspecified house he worked for previously. “It’s one of my most interesting memories. They called it ‘gorge cleanup.’”

“Another frat used to lock guys in the basement and play the yodeling part of The Sound of Music for 24 hours,” said Celentano. “I don’t know how they did it, it drove me crazy, never mind the guys.”

Other house traditions involved the chefs themselves.

“We used to have a Jack Daniels dinner every year at Rockledge,” said Ferrell. “Basically, everything had whiskey in it, including me.”

The brothers are largely appreciative of the work their chefs do for them, though, and the conditions that they put up with.

“Arthur is great,” said Phi Sig brother Greg Muenzen ’10 about Birnbaum. “We don’t treat him as well as we should.”

“Our last chef was a mess,” said Logan Pierce ’10, a brother at Phi Tau. “Don is a really great guy and really takes care of us.”

One perk to the job is that each chef gets the summer off. Ferrell spent his summers traveling, while Celentano runs a landscaping company and Scooter uses his summers for his popular catering business, Scooter’s Barbeque.

When it comes down to it, though, each chef essentially becomes a member of the fraternity he or she works for.

“I was definitely a part of Chi Phi when I worked for them,” said Celentano. “I was on their composite for 10 years, and I went to all of their parties. I even brought my wife sometimes.”

Birnbaum also felt strongly about his bond with the brothers.

“We’re like a big family,” Birnbaum said. “I can’t imagine not cooking for these guys.”

And the brothers agree.

“I can’t imagine our house without Arthur,” said Matt Goldwasser ’10 of Phi Sig. “We would fall apart.”