After working in fine dining restaurants home and abroad for the past five years, 22-year-old AJ Sankofa found himself out of a job when the COVID-19 outbreak hit New York City. When close friend Joel Camarillo approached him with the idea of starting their own pasta business, Sankofa jumped at the opportunity to use his knowledge and passion to make a dream come true.
That dream is ESO Artisanal Pasta, bringing the flavors of Italy home to customers in the New York/New Jersey area and expected to start in the very near future. “I take what I have learned very seriously. We are not using mediocre ingredients,” he explained. “We are importing 85 percent of our ingredients from Italy. We are putting on the finishing touches.”
JOCKEY HOLLOW
He began working at the Jockey Hollow Bar and Kitchen during the second semester of his senior year in high school, a time when he was part of an early college program due to his having enough credits already to graduate high school. “I was working at a catering hall because my cousins were working there when a friend told me he was making $500 a week as a busboy at a new restaurant in Morristown (New Jersey),” he said.”
Sankofa had a good feeling when he arrived at the restaurant for an interview as Jockey is located in the Vail Mansion, a familiar place to him growing up. “I skateboarded there as a kid,” he stated. “You can still see the grind marks where the patio is now from all of us who used to skateboard. That restaurant ending up changing my life.”
Executive Chef Kevin Sippel saw something quickly in his new busboy and his mentorship has played, and continues to play, a huge role in Sankofa’s career. “AJ was a busboy, then a water, then an assistant,” Sippel recalled. “He asked me what I thought of him coming into the kitchen. He worked hard, studied the menus, and was just levels above most workers. He has things that can’t be taught. He has the right mentality.”
“I was the kind of kid, and I still have this mentality, that I wanted to do the best in everything I did,” Sankofa remarked. “I wanted to be the best busboy, I wanted my uniform to look the best. One time I was walking through the kitchen from the dish area to another part of the restaurant when the Executive Chef (Sippel), who I didn’t even know knew who I was, asked if I was ready to start food running. The next week, I was scheduled for food running.”
Already taking college classes while working full-time at the restaurant, Sankofa had more studying to do to pass the Captain’s Exam, which was a test that essentially went over every single sector of the restaurant. “I started understanding why everything was done. I watched and I studied,” he explained. “It started to click. When I first started in the kitchen, I could see what I was getting myself into.”
“We showed him a lot, but he is the one who took the next steps. He asked me how I got where I did,” Sippel recounted. “A lot of young people expect to come in the kitchen and be executive chefs. AJ was one of the few guys who really understood what it takes. He has the work ethic, the spirit, and the intelligence.”
Although he had always intended to go to college and was accepted at 12 colleges, Sankofa found he was not inspired to go the traditional university route, preferring to study cooking instead. “I was thinking, ‘Why don’t I try to get to Italy and study there?’ I learned about this place called the Italian Culinary Institute for Foreigners (ICIF),” he described. “I had built a great relationship with Chef Kevin, who has played an important role in every space of my development. I showed him the link to the school and he whips out his graduation photo from 1996, the year before I was born, from that school! He told me all about it and how he could help me.”
ITALY
Sankofa didn’t tell anyone other than his family and Sippel that he was planning to go to Italy to study in June 2016. Until then, he continued working and learning as much as he could. “At the time, I didn’t realize I was moving up over guys 10 years older than me. If I am going to do anything, I am going to do it all out.”
Perhaps keeping busy prevented him from thinking about the enormous undertaking of being so young and going off to study and live in a country he knew nothing about. “I got on the plane and when it took off, I realized what I was doing,” admitted Sankofa, who had traveled to Brazil and many places in the U.S., but never alone. “I was leaving the country at 18 years old all by myself. I did even cry a little. My family was making it a big deal. It was a big deal.”
ICIF’s headquarters are located in a castle in Costigliole d’Asti, a small town in the hills of Monferrato. The students’ dormitory is in an old farmhouse in the Piedmont Hills about a mile from classes. “There was a path we took to get to the castle. It is hard to put into words how breathtaking it is with the trees, vegetation, woods, and rolling hills,” Sankofa articulated.
The first thing the class did upon their arrival at the castle was to have dinner, where the sommelier was the same one who worked there when Sippel studied at the institute. “The first thing I realized was that I knew nothing and that I was not qualified to be there. I was so thankful to Chef Kevin for helping me get the opportunity,” Sankofa revealed. “My level was much different than the other students so I had to work very hard to earn a positive repertoire with the instructor. He was very hard on me, pushed me every day about everything from speaking Italian to knife cuts to organization.”
All that hard work paid off as he finished with the highest grade in the class. He landed two internships after the classes. Steve Morgan, brother of Jockey Hollow general manager Ron Morgan, had a connection with the Foradori Winery in Mezzolombardo and helped get Sankofa a job as staff meal chef and harvest worker. “I would cook lunch and then go picking with them in the afternoon. It was the first time I was ever in charge of a kitchen. I killed it the first day and quickly ran out of ideas,” he laughed. “It became extremely challenging and I was trying new things. I ended up only cooking 2-3 weeks and just picked grapes for the rest of September.”
The second internship came out of a guest chef exposition during class by Chef Andrea Larossa of Michelin starred Ristorante Larossa in Alba, Italy. Sankofa was wearing a special blue apron in honor of Jockey Hollow sous chef Justin Pehowic, who died suddenly at age 37 in March 2016. “His passing was very traumatic for all of us. I had one of those special aprons with me in Italy,” he explained. “Chef Larossa walked into the classroom, and he and his sous chef had the same apron. He was on another level and I was eager to make a great impression.”
He impressed Chef Larossa enough to be asked to come work with him. “It worked out perfectly because I started in October, which is truffle season in Alba,” Sankofa elucidated. “We built a very strong bond. His wife was the sommelier, there were two back servers, a sous chef, me, and one other intern. We did everything together.”
A WINDING ROAD AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES
Upon returning to the U.S., he went back to work with Sippel at Jockey Hollow. “He went to Ristorante Larossa, working with an incredible chef, and came back and worked with us. He started to flourish in the kitchen,” Sippel recalled. “I would yell at him and we would just keep going. He asked questions. He was a sponge. He wanted to know how to progress.”
“I was ready to work. I would go to work every day at 9 a.m., but didn’t clock in until 5:30 p.m. and clock out when the last ticket went out,” described Sankofa, who had a feeling things were about to change after a conversation with Sippel in April 2017.
“Chef Kevin said ‘You guys have been doing a great job. I am not crucial and you can handle it.’ I wasn’t grasping exactly what he was saying at the time,” Sankofa revealed. “To me, he was everything. He taught me what I knew and gave me opportunities to become the person I am now. A week later, he officially announced he was leaving.”
From April through October of 2017, Jockey Hollow was without an executive chef. “I basically took on a management role. I had worked all of the stations and was willing to do it,” Sankofa explained. “I ended up working there until just before Christmas (2018), but by the end, I was just there for the money. I was no longer who or where I wanted to be.”
After taking three full weeks off for the first time since he started working at 17, Sankofa reached back out to Sippel, who was now the executive chef at The Buffalo Club in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. “I was so happy to happy he was with me. I knew we would have a good service and he wouldn’t go down on his line,” Sippel expressed.
“I was happy to be back in that environment with the freedom to learn. It was almost a consulting role,” Sankofa remembered. “I was working on menus, tasting and creating dishes. That prepared me to go back to Jersey.”
Sippel had other ideas. “I told him he needs to go work in Manhattan. New Jersey is a great state, but Manhattan is the place for culinary arts,” he stated. “When I was back home on a Friday, Chef Kevin called me and told me to go to this address to meet up with what turned out to be my new employers at Legacy Records,” Sankofa communicated. “I started that Tuesday and worked there for a month and was making a higher hourly rate than ever before.”
He returned to Italy to work with Chef Larossa again in April 2019, but he had issues securing the type of visa necessary to stay there and get paid. He stayed there six months, working through Italy’s slow period for restaurants from April through October, still hoping to get the visa he needed.
He then began his second stint at Legacy, where things progressed quickly for him, but the handwriting was on the wall for the restaurant. “We were all watching the news from China about the coronavirus, but I wasn’t ready at all when it hit New York,” he conceded. “I was just getting comfortable when the restaurant closed because of COVID-19.”
DREAMING TOGETHER
Although his time at Legacy was cut short by coronavirus, Sankofa gained valuable experience and also met his girlfriend Kristina Gambarian, who replaced him on the pasta station when he was promoted. A cook and baker who was born in Ukraine and came to the U.S. as part of a study abroad program, she moved to New Jersey after the restaurant closed.
“We spent the first few weeks on the couch watching Netflix,” he chuckled. “April hit and we knew we had to do something. I am not used to not working. My grandmother is 80 and runs a t-shirt business, using a crank machine out of her garage, my father has worked six nights a week for 30 years. We all have this absurd work ethic.”
While he and Camarillo were starting to work on their business, Gambarian also decided to pursue her dream of owning a bakery. She started Babushkaspies, selling freshly baked homemade cakes and pies in the New York/New Jersey area. Meanwhile, Sankofa started working for Instacart to pay for necessities and items for both businesses.
Throughout his journey, Sankofa has maintained the same philosophy. “Whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability or you are wasting your time. You have to push yourself,” he described. “You need the right mindset and planning. You have to work hard and do your due diligence to expect great things.”