Entering through the iron gate one gets their first glimpse of the church’s stained glass windows. A small sign that reads, “Church of England, Christ Church,” directs the congregation inside. Entering the church I immediately feel like a fish out of water. I can’t remember the last time I’ve set foot in a church for more than a couple minutes to admire the architecture, let alone to be active in any way. 

Heading down the stairs, directed by the signs leading volunteers to the community kitchen, I enter a hall full of tables and drying aprons and dish towels. Aline, one of the Kitchen’s full time employees, welcomes me, as she checks who has registered to volunteer for the day and begins preparing for the portioners arrival. I hang my backpack on the coat rack, wash my hands, put on an apron and hairnet and bring myself to the kitchen. It’s 9am. 

Often I am the only volunteer in the kitchen, and if not, I’m typically the first volunteer to arrive. Akkara already has the music on, often playing Doja Cat. Anjali, another of the kitchen’s employees, is in the back room eyeing the coolers and what ingredients we have to work with today. It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s orzo. 

We fill three large tubs with orzo, 500g at a time. Once we’re finished we fill the tubs with cool water so the orzo can soak. 

“Onions?” Akkara asks.

I return the coolers and the pantry and grab a 10kg bag of onions from the shelf. Throwing it over my shoulder I haul it into the kitchen where I begin my prep. I lay down a cutting board, and grab the sharpest knife I can find–which can often take two or three attempts to find one I’m confident with. I slice off the tops of each onion, making sure to keep the roots intact so as to reduce the concentration of eye watering chemicals. After cutting the onion in half, I remove the outer layer from both halves before slicing three horizontal cuts into the vegetable. Then, moving to the top, I made half a dozen vertical cuts from top to bottom, before positioning my knife perpendicularly, dicing the onion into a small pile. 

One down, 45 to go. 

When I finish with onions, it’s on to cauliflower. The frozen bags of cauliflower, having been defrosted in cool water, are strained and quartered. I assist with stirring the large pots, of which now are nicely browning the onions I’ve diced previously. Bell peppers are added, along with tomato sauce, and seasoned generously with herbs and spices. After that has reduced, the cauliflower is added and the sauce cooks down even further. 

The orzo, now hydrated, is drained and added to the pots of sauce. Anjali offers me a spoon to taste. A little salt is added, and left to simmer. 

By now it’s a little after 10:30 and the crew of portioners have begun to arrive. Clad in hairnets and aprons as well, they make talk amongst one another in anticipation of the first pot. 

Once cooked down, the large pot is loaded onto a trolley–often by two people–and wheeled out into the hall where it is portioned, boxed up, loaded into vans, and delivered across the city to the HUB where it will still be hot when it arrives. 

One by one the pots return to the kitchen. The dishwasher is currently broken, so everything must be washed by hand. Using steel wool, I scrape away the baked bits at the bottom of the pot, rinsing it with the powerful and hot spray nozzle before scraping again. Anjali insists I don’t have to do it, but it has to be done so I do it. Each pot, dish, spoon, and staff coffee cup is washed, dried and put away. At this point, most of the portioners have left. 

Akkara and Aline are in the hall working out the numbers and preparing for their next order. 

“There’s some extra grapes in the cooler, if you want them,” Akkara offers for my day’s work. 

I wash up, discard my hairnet, and take my backpack from the coat rack. My entire front is wet from the splashing water of the dishes. My back is a bit stiff from being on my feet all morning. My hands, pruney and shriveled from the water, smell like onions.

“See you next week,” I say with a nod, putting a tub of grapes into my backpack. 

- - -

It’s important to do away with a few stigmas and misrepresentations that often come with cooking in a place like the Community Kitchen. 

First, the meals are all prepared by professionals. Akkara knows her stuff. Having trained in cooking in Namur for six years, Akkara is a highly certified chef with the qualifications to back it up. Having been given the option of restaurant cooking or more industrial focused food preparation, Akkara chose the industrial side for one simple reason–the hours. As a chef in a restaurant, one often has to work crazy hours as well as weekends. Akkara wanted to cook without sacrificing time for her family and friends. In her training, Akkara not only learned front of house and the kitchen, she trained as a server, while at the same time learning advanced plating techniques and cooking methods. In her last year of training she learned the nitty gritty of what it means to be a chef de cuisine–ordering, managing money, and telling people what to do.

After completing her studies she worked as an intérimaire, or temp worker, for a few months, but often found the colleagues hard to stomach. “They were all real alpha men-type. Gross and mean,” she says of those early working days. “I knew I wanted to leave that.”

During this time she briefly thought about changing, studied caretaking for one year, but a stage during COVID traumatized her, redirecting her back to cooking. Akkara started volunteering in the kitchen while she also was looking for a job. For a year she found herself depressed. “I would tell people I was fine,” she says, reflecting on that time, “but clearly I wasn’t.”

Her first day as a volunteer was on a Sunday making muffins. “It was really fun,” she remembers,  “I came back day after day.” Not long after, the boss offered her a leadership position, which eventually evolved into a paid position, as the project grew bigger and bigger, making Akkara the first paid employee of the Community Kitchen.

Before Akkara came on full time in 2021, most of the ordering was done by eye-balling what was in the coolers at the time. Bringing with her her training and know-how, Akkara helped to streamline the kitchen into a well oiled operation. The project continues to grow, in part due to more and more organizations reaching out to the community kitchen for their services, but also because things are generally getting worse and worse for people.

With help from Serve the City, a volunteer organization in Brussels, the Community Kitchen began recruiting the help of daily volunteers. Serve the City’s ServeNow app is very helpful, as it allows volunteers to easily sign up for shifts, while allowing the managers to remind volunteers, send messages, and coordinate efforts. Despite this, it can still be difficult to find volunteers–especially during the summer and the holiday times. 

Reliant on volunteers for much of the daily work, Akkara says some of the volunteers who come in for the first time, are scared of being in the kitchen. “Social media projects, this like, classic mean, yelling chefs.” Akkara assures me, “If you can boil an egg, there’s room for you here. The Community Kitchen is a place where we welcome everyone.” Race? Religion? It doesn’t matter. Often the kitchen and portioning hall is full of volunteers from all over the world, with some volunteers having been doing so since as far back as 2019.

It is also important to understand that all of the meals prepared in the Community Kitchen are prepared without any federal funding, but instead entirely by private donations. Even the pots and pans are via donations. It’s only when something is desperately needed, the Community Kitchen must resort to buying it. After a full renovation of the kitchen a couple years ago, with the help of a large donation, they bought new equipment, new tables, and carts. But every purchase is a negotiation, and they often must make due with what they have.

“We now have four ovens that work-ish,” Akkara says. She tells me about the kitchen’s previous ovens, and the sad state they were in at the time of renovation. As much as they would like to have better ovens still, and sharp knives, and even a bigger kitchen space, there’s often little that can be done without additional funding. 

“It’s difficult, but we manage,” she says in somewhat of a defeated but accepting tone. “It would be nice to have better ovens, definitely.”  

Despite the work she does, and the limitations put on her and the other chefs at the Community Kitchen, Akkara says some would equate what they make to “slop.” 

“It is still food,” she says defiantly, and yes, the quality is different, which is to be expected being that they are unable to buy the highest quality ingredients, but they are buying fresh vegetables. For one of their portioned meals, the cost of preparation is only around 25 cents including paying employees, drivers, and everything else. 

I ask Akkara if she plans on sticking around at the Community Kitchen long term. “We need funds, we need money,” she says in response. Even the employees are unsure if there will be enough funds to renew their contracts, and while Akkara has been the chef de cuisine here for two years, everytime her contract comes around for renewal, she hopes she’ll be able to stay on for another year. 

This is a place where Akkara used to come to church. As a child, her mother wanted to go to a church that reminded her of England, and spoke English. Akkara and her sister went to Sunday school here. Her boss was her Sunday school teacher when she was 8 years old. 

For many chefs, a kitchen is a second home. A ritualistic place that becomes not a second or third space, but the space. If you’ve ever worked in a kitchen you know how hard it can be to keep a chef away even on a day off. The connections made with the stainless steel work tables, the knives and wooden mixing spoons, the sous chefs, the ingredients, and the food ultimately produced, are for some what keeps them getting up every morning.