Family Ties

Adam Simmons, child nutrition director for 9,000-student Fayetteville Public Schools in Arkansas, grew up working in his family’s restaurants. After a brief stint in banking, Simmons returned to his culinary roots, eventually landing in child nutrition after a lunch at his nephew’s school.

“My grandparents had restaurants all over Arkansas. A lot of them were in hotels. They were good home-cooking, everything-from-scratch places. We had a chain called the Simon’s Ole South Pancake House. We had another restaurant in Eureka Springs called the Ozark Village that, volume-wise, was as close as I’ve come to child nutrition. It’s in a vacation area south of Branson, Mo. We did about 4,000 or 5,000 covers a day. I did a little bit of everything. If our dishwasher was out I would wash dishes; if the bookkeeper was out I’d do the books; if a cook was out I’d cook.

I saw the restaurant business [age] my grandparents a lot. They worked 12 or 15 hours a day. We all took a week off in the summer and went to Florida but that was it. I remember Christmas Eve singing carols and the phone would ring and they both would have to go to the restaurant for something.

I went to college to get out of the restaurant business. The lure of business hours seemed like something that I wanted to do. I got a job in a bank after college and realized that I didn’t like to wear ties and suits. A month later I started at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. I always loved food so it wasn’t difficult to jump right back in. My first 10 years after I got out of school I was mainly in Aspen, Colo., running restaurants and hotels.

I got into child nutrition after I went to my nephew’s school and ate lunch. I was uneducatedly appalled by what was being served. Everything was processed. When I was in school everything was scratch cooking. For holidays we always bought our pies and dinner rolls, even though my family were good cooks, you could get really good products from the schools. It was a chance to get back closer to home.”