Each week, “Pop Quiz” features an interview with a member of Greater Houston’s education community. To suggest someone we should interview with an interesting story to tell, email us at education@houstonlanding.org.
Meet the interviewee
One of Houston’s latest chefs to receive a Michelin Star finds himself in the Bayou City today by a twist of fate.
Felipe Riccio, chef and partner at Montrose’s fine-dining Mediterranean restaurant March, was attending high school in Fort Bend when an unexpected change to his family’s immigration status dashed his hopes of attending a prestigious culinary school in New York or Rhode Island after graduation.
Reluctantly at first, Riccio stuck around locally to attend Houston Community College’s culinary program. But over the years, he fell more in love with cooking by learning from HCC’s chefs. The last decade took him from working as a dishwasher in a Fort Bend pizza place, to high-profile restaurants in Italy, to the top chef at March.
Now awarded one of the most coveted honors in the industry, at a restaurant just two miles away from the school where he learned the ropes, Riccio sees his journey as full-circle. In our latest Pop Quiz, the Houston Landing spoke with Riccio about getting his start at HCC and his advice to local community college students breaking into the field.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Tell me about how you ended up in Houston.
I was actually born in Mexico City. I only lived there about a year and a half. Then, pretty much my childhood was in Veracruz, on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, a beautiful coastal town. Both my parents were, for the majority of my childhood, in tourism. So my mom worked in restaurants in front-of-house, like management, and then eventually for most of my childhood at a hotel. And both of my grandparents on my mother’s side were lawyers, and so I always said I wanted to be a lawyer and own a restaurant.
And then I moved to the U.S. in 2003. I would have been in eighth grade. … We had family ties (in Houston). … I went to high school in Missouri City and Elkins High School in Fort Bend. My freshman year, I took a criminal justice class. I was ready to get going, like, “What law school am I gonna apply to?” All that. I did Intro to Criminal Justice (class), and I just hated it. It was terrible. … A big part of it was the teacher, and so bad teachers are just as influential as good teachers, regrettably so.
That’s an ideal time to find out you hated the subject. How did you transition into cooking?
I was like, “Oh man, what am I gonna do, if I don’t want to be a lawyer?” And so I said, “Well, I should look at cooking.” … I found out that my high school had a technical education program at one of the other high schools in Fort Bend, and I ended up looking into it, and they had a culinary arts program. I remember going to my counselor and picking classes, and she was like, “Oh, no, you can’t do this until you are a junior.”
She was like, “Just kind of do things at home and learn about it.” And so that’s kind of what I did. My whole sophomore year, I remember I must have baked hundreds of cheesecakes. I started with baking because it was a little easier to do that at home. … Junior year came around, I did the program. Senior year, I did the program as well. I think it was this summer between my sophomore and junior years, when I started working as a dishwasher at a new pizza restaurant that opened just down the street from my high school. … I spent a couple years at that restaurant. I moved from dishwasher quickly to topping the pizzas and then eventually working all the stations. I ended up really enjoying it and doing culinary competitions.
I started really looking at where I would end up for school. And that time and still today, two of the best schools are Johnson and Wales and the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. And so that was kind of my dream to go to Hyde Park. It’s this beautiful campus. It is … extremely expensive, like, stupidly expensive. And so I worked really hard. I did some competitions. I did good in school. I had some scholarships. And as I am kind of looking at applying … my mom sits me down … she says, “We gotta talk about some things, because there’s some things that have changed with our immigration status, basically just through the broken system and mistakes from lawyers and things like that, we lose status.”
By that time, I’m 16. I’m getting my driver’s license. And my mom tells me, “You’re not gonna be able to do this. We’re gonna fix it, but you’re not gonna be able to do this right now.” And so then obviously I’m looking at it, what does this mean for college? I ended up realizing that I’m not gonna be able to go to CIA. I’m not gonna be able to go to school out of state. I’m not getting any grants, any scholarships. … It was daunting, right? Like knowing that there was this issue that I had no control over.
So is that how you ended up attending HCC?
I end up kind of trying to figure out what I’m going to do, looking at other schools, not really being happy. I’m at a family get-together, and a friend of my uncle — I didn’t really know him — happened to be there, and he was actually a recruiter for HCC. … We ended up talking about (how) I wanted to cook.
He said, “I work at HCC. I’m one of the recruiters. There’s a fantastic pastry chef, his name is Eddie Van Dam — you should look him up, and you should come see him.” And I was like, “Whatever. I really want to go to CIA.” I was angry.
I remember I looked at Eddie’s chef website. … It was a phenomenal website with recipes, beautiful photography, and I remember just being blown away. And then, anyway, a few weeks later, I go to HCC, I meet him, I see where the culinary program was at the time … And I just kind of was enamored with his story, who he was and his background.
And then I got to meet some of the other instructors. I got to meet Chef Sykes, who was my culinary instructor. I was still working in kitchens at that time. I literally never stopped working in restaurants, since I started working at that pizza joint. I did research. I was able to get scholarships and grants and things like that, because I went to high school all four years. Even though I was undocumented, I was considered a resident for Texas schools, and so I could have gone to UT or any other school, any other state school or local college.
I think what prepared me for this industry was having good teachers, good instructors, having the support of different communities and having access to good education that was local, that was affordable. And I truly mean this. … I don’t really know what would have happened if I didn’t find HCC, I probably would have moved out of the country.
It sounds like you had a pretty unconventional path to getting to HCC. In your industry, how do people feel about a community college culinary education versus a place like the CIA?
No, I don’t think (people care), to be honest. There’s a lot of people in this industry that are really good folks and really good chefs that don’t have “formal schooling,” right? … At the end of the day, it’s a trade. I think as a society, we’ve done a really poor job at marketing those trade jobs, either they’ve disappeared, or they are looked upon as beneath (us) or dirty jobs, or whatever it may be. But all those trade jobs are still extremely important. Trade schools and trade schools within community colleges are extremely important. They’re the backbones of many small towns and even large cities. And so at the end of the day, it’s a trade, right? And so it’s what you were able to do with the skills and the knowledge that you have.
No matter what, for us, whether you have a culinary degree from a large school or an abroad school, whatever it is, at the end of the day, it comes down to much more than that.
Is there anything that you learned in those years in HCC’s culinary school that you carry with you today?
I mean, all of it. Because, again, they are skills that you build upon, right? Chef Sykes, who was my culinary instructor at HCC … we’re dear friends. She came in for dinner at March. I begged her to come in after we got Michelin-starred. … She made a comment, she said, “It just blows my mind that the things that we learned in school and that I taught you in school, those things that you learned that were so basic are now, what you were able to do with it — these beautiful plates, these ideas.” And I told her, it’s all the same, whether you’re making a really simple, classic recipe or a really creative, innovative dish that’s super stunning and beautiful. All the basics are the same. All the building blocks are the same. And so I think young folks will ask, “Should I go to culinary school?” It is an individual decision. But I always say, if you want to go to culinary school, go to a community college wherever you’re at and work at the same time. Work at least a part-time job, not a full-time job, and go to culinary school at the same time, because that is the amount of focus and work that it’s going to take in the first years.
And you’re going to have to really apply it, because at the end of the day, in school, you’ve got to get to the next thing. At a restaurant, you’re repeating the same thing every day. The menu remains relatively the same at most restaurants. And so you’ve got to do the same thing over and over and over and over again. And so you’re really going to get really good at those skills.
All of it, everything I’ve learned, the relationships that I’ve made, a lot of them are still here in Houston.
What do you do as an advisory board member for HCC’s culinary arts program?
We actually do biannual meetings to talk about the state of the program. Any challenges, any advice, the state of the industry, things like that. It’s really good. I want it to be more. I know they do as well, which is hard — the bureaucracy of it all and everything.
I think it’s helpful for them as well, and for the instructors, and then even for administrators, to hear from people in the industry that are doing that. At the end of the day, their job is to train people that go to school for whatever they’re doing, to go out and do something with what they learn. They might end up being a chef, they might end up being something else, but whatever they do is to prepare them to be good members of society that get to do whatever their goals are. And so I think it’s nice to hear (from them). We employ different HCC students, it’s good for them to hear from us as well.
So you employ HCC students at March?
I think at this point, we actually have a couple of graduates, and a couple of them are still in school. We have four right now, four different previous pastry or culinary arts students.
People in similar situations who are just getting into culinary programs likely take inspiration from your story of going from HCC to obtaining a Michelin star. What’s your advice to those who are just breaking into the industry?
Oh, man. “Work hard” truly is the number one thing. And also realize that all that hard work is for you. I say this to my team members as well. We have standards and they’re high, and we’re going to keep you accountable for them, but at the end of the day, you’re not doing that because you might lose your job or (because) I’m paying you whatever I’m paying you to do the job. You’re doing a good job because it’s what you do, and it’s who you are, and it reflects who you are.
Caring is super important. … We tell that to the team all the time: care about what you do and don’t care about it because, “Chef might see me doing it wrong,” or, “Chef is going to see me do it right.” Care because it’s the right thing to do. If you can do better, ask for help, learn, become better. … Working hard and caring about the job that you do, the work that you do, is paramount.
Miranda covers Houston’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus. Despite roughly half of Houston’s higher-education students attending community colleges, there hasn’t been much news covering these systems or students — until now. Her reporting holds institutions accountable, highlights barriers faced by students and helps them navigate their opportunities. Reach Miranda at miranda@houstonlanding.org or on Twitter and Instagram.
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