Ohio inmates whip up five-course meal from prison garden for 60 community members

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Inmates at an Ohio prison with a penchant for cooking whipped up a five-course meal over the weekend and served it to members of the public in a first for the state.

Almost 60 people dined in the Grafton Correctional Institution’s garden space, where the very fruits and vegetables they were munching on for the groundbreaking meal were grown by prisoners.

The unique experience was made possible thanks to the prison’s EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute, which offers six-month culinary courses to incarcerated people at 652 prisons and jails around the country, setting them up with the skills and certifications needed to work in a fine dining establishment.

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Founder Chef Brandon Crostowski said the program was born out of the belief that “every human being, regardless of their past, has the right to a fair and equal future” — an ideal that was felt by all for the momentous meal.

“They’re not looking at me as a number. They’re looking at me as a person,” Greg Sigelmier, 40, an inmate at GCI, told the Associated Press.

A long rectangular table adorned with a white linen cloth, bouquets of flowers and fresh bread was placed between the two gardens, dubbed the “EDWINS’ Garden” and the “Hope City Garden.”

Guests from the local community were offered a beet salad with goat cheese and greens to start, followed by a kale “purse” with farmer cheese.

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Next, they were treated to roasted salmon topped with a béarnaise sauce and braised garden greens. Roasted lamb with tomato provencal followed.

Dessert included a corn cake with blueberry compote and Chantilly cream.

Each course was paired with a mocktail, one of them named the “botinique” — soda with a thyme-infused honey syrup and lemon.

Almost all the bites were grown in the prison garden.

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“Working together as the community that we are and at the end getting to eat the food, it’s the best part. You should see the faces on these guys when they’re eating just the regular chicken noodle soup that we just all worked together. It’s incredible,” 28-year-old Efrain Paniagua-Villa said.

Cooking was not foreign to Paniagua-Villa — he routinely made meals with his mom and sister before his incarceration — but the task has served as a fruitful pastime.

He said cooking with EDWINS has helped fill the gap that was left when he began his stint in prison 2 1/2 years ago.

The incarcerated men in the EDWINS culinary program at GCI are serving a variety of sentences from short to life and range in age from 20 to 70, according to the organization.

Some of the men will have the opportunity to graduate from the program and apply to work at many restaurants in the Cleveland area upon their release.

“Many of our guys that live here are going home, so they’re going home to be our neighbors. We want our neighbors to be prepared to be law-abiding citizens, and that’s what this program is about. It’s not just about teaching guys how to cook or how to prepare food,” said GCI warden Jerry Spatny. “

This gives them reentry level skills so that when they go home, they can be successful in that environment.”

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