Brownsville Community Culinary Center Wins SARA’s Highest National Design Award in Excellence

ACHA is delighted to share that the Brownsville Community Culinary Center has won SARA’s highest national design award for Excellence from the Society of American Registered Architects (SARA).

October, 2022

In an area designated as a food desert, the Brownsville Community Culinary Center (BCCC) is a welcoming, multi-use venue where the community can gather to enjoy culturally relevant and healthy foods prepared by local youths participating in its tuition-free, world-class culinary education.

The Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn is a community which, after decades of unfulfilled urban policies, racist agendas, and redlining, is burdened with poverty, high-crime, health issues, unemployment, and a dearth of healthy food options, officially deemed a food desert. ACHA’s client, a non-profit founded by a Michelin-star restaurant chef, sought to reverse these trends with the BCCC.

The client chose a 5000sf single-story building, a former five-and-dime store on a central commercial street as the location. The project has three components: Community, Education, and Healthy Food, comprising a community center, a tuition-free, world-class culinary training venue for local young adults, a restaurant, and a café.

The design and program activate this formerly vacant space into a safe, comfortable environment where neighbors can share three healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant daily meals prepared by the students. In turn, the students learn culinary skills and how to operate a restaurant. In addition to the teaching kitchen and educational spaces, the design provides the neighborhood’s first table-service restaurant in 50 years and community spaces for local organizations.

As visitors and students are both from the community, the design relies on a soft edge between front and back-of-house areas. A large glass window gives correspondence between students in the Bakery and guests in the Café. Similarly, the Service Kitchen is open to the Dining Room. The Teaching Kitchen and the Classroom/Community Room’s flexible space, are, in contrast, more enclosed, providing focus and privacy.

Through its fluid spatiality and adaptability, the BCCC is available to groups gathering to address neighborhood issues, as well as for individuals to socialize in a public space. As a testament to its design, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the culinary non-profit and its students, joined by a host of partners and volunteers, temporarily transformed this model to provide hundreds of thousands of healthy meals to the community, including house-bound seniors and residents in shelters. This act of community is attributable to the success of the BCCC’s partners and residents, and its architecture, designed to support meaningful community engagement.