Combine high-octane fuel with double-strength caffeine and a spurt of typhoon-level winds and you end up with Allison Sosna, the 25-year-old contract foods executive chef for DC Central Kitchen’s catering business, Fresh Start. Unlike most catering companies, Fresh Start provides farm-to-table catering to the public, to seven District public schools, one charter school, one day care center and one private middle school for low-income boys. It must take that amount of energy to handle it all.
A native of New Jersey (but born in Brooklyn), Sosna concedes to having two overarching passions in life: sports and cooking.
“With sports, you name it, and I’ve done it,” she said, which includes softball, fencing, basketball, soccer, biking and rowing. All of that must explain why this slender, trim young woman does not weigh 500 pounds after cooking and dreaming about food, all day, every day.
Oddly, her first passion was sports, which led to her second one. As she explains, in college she thought she would end up being a professional rower, but during a semester in Italy and while training for an international rowing event, she worked out daily in a small gym just north of Rome.
“In my spare time I would go to local bodegas, local markets that featured tons of amazing local foods,” she said. “I loved learning about food, and knew I would never be tired of it. Food is so intricate: it’s history, culture, sociology, arts, music, science. I wanted to make food my living.”
It’s no surprise, then, Sosna’s life was about to make a dramatic change: she fell in love with Italian cooking.
“I loved the food there, and it changed my life,” she said. “I found I had a weird relationship with food; I became an athlete turned foodie.”
After working in numerous D.C. restaurants — including with her mentor, Barton Seaver, when he was at Hook — she graduated from Gaithersburg’s L’Academie de Cuisine.
“After working with Barton Seaver, I got why we eat local and seasonal,” she said. “He was the connection.”
Then she did a stint in the kitchens of the Inn at Little Washington, reinforcing her dedication to using fresh, local and sustainable ingredients.
When Sosna started at DC Central Kitchen as the executive sous chef for Fresh Start Catering, she was tasked with creating customized menus, and obviously was so successful she was promoted to executive chef in just three months.
“‘Oh, Mom, you will not believe what just happened,’” she said about immediately notifying her mother of the promotion. “I stayed up all night writing ideas. That promotion changed my life.”
As she wrote up a catering business plan for simple meals made from local and seasonal ingredients, she says she ended up spending months sourcing what she could get, writing training manuals and developing streamlined yet appealing menus with delicious, basic sandwiches, salads and a continental breakfast.
“Yes, we have only 15 items on our menu,” she said, “but it is the best we can make. It is about the integrity of the products.”
As for Fresh Start’s work with schools — nine in all at this writing — Sosna oversees a daily menu program that makes food from scratch.
“It’s all about from fresh to local to scratch cooking,” she said. “We provide kids with real food.”
As she talks about biking around town from one job or destination to the next, Sosna sums it up.
“It’s not about ego; it’s about doing what’s right for these kids’ health and building stronger communities,” she said. “I want to bring people together with food. Feeding kids is the coolest thing in the world. They are the toughest critics in the world.”
