Inside the kitchen of a greek house chef

Peter Tarantelli spends nearly 12 hours a day at Penn’s Greek houses, but he’s not a fraternity brother.

Tarantelli is the beloved chef for two of Penn’s Greek houses, Alpha Phi and Sigma Alpha Mu — more commonly known as Sammy — and, more recently, author of the self-published cookbook “Simple to Gourmet Vegan,” which he released last week.

When I met Tarantelli, he was clad in jeans and a hoodie, his long hair tied back in an undone man-bun. He handed me a copy of his book as well as a plate of vegan blueberry crumbcake with instructions to “nuke for fifteen seconds.” As I leafed through his cookbook, I was taken aback at the “normal” foods he’s added — mac and cheese, “chicken” parmesan and chocolate fudge brownie cake accompany more typically vegan options, like Indian chickpea broccoli pakora fritters and a bean salad.

Dinner for Sixty

The 41-year-old Buffalo native started cooking in Penn’s Greek system when he moved to Philadelphia in 2009. He has cooked five days a week at Alpha Phi since 2009 and was hired by Sammy to cook twice a week beginning this semester. In addition, he worked at Sigma Alpha Epsilon for a year and had a five-year stint cooking for APES from 2010 to 2015.

Making meals for 21 girls and 40 college guys takes a lot of work — Tarantelli compared it to cooking “Thanksgiving dinner seven times a week.” On a typical weekday, Tarantelli said he arrives at ShopRite when it opens at 6 a.m. to buy his groceries for the day. He arrives at the Alpha Phi house one to two hours later and lays out breakfast food for the girls, then begins his preparation for dinner. He leaves Penn’s campus once he finishes serving dinner at both houses, around 6 p.m.

Some of his most requested items are coconut rice with mushroom crusted tofu, for the Sammy guys, and chicken parmesan, guacamole and naan for the Alpha Phi girls. His desserts that he makes three times a week for the girls are also a hit — his vegan chocolate chip banana bread and crispy peanut butter candies are frequently requested.

“As much as the girls say they want to eat healthy, they love it when I make treats,” Tarantelli said.

Tarantelli uses what he describes as his perfect “food memory” — he remembers what each person likes and doesn’t like — to create menus that the students will love. College sophomore Kalyb Sims said Tarantelli gave the girls a survey at the beginning of the year asking about what food they liked, adding that he does a great job catering to everyone’s preferences.

Tarantelli is somewhat of a perfectionist — he won’t repeat any menus unless the students request them again, preferring to “creatively challenge” himself, and he won’t put his name on any food unless it’s perfect. Though he said he’s not “above” making any certain food, no matter what students request, he will make it with style — for example, when the girls want chicken nuggets, he’ll prepare different kinds of homemade sauce.

Tarantelli’s cooking encourages some girls to make vegan choices — though all his desserts and many of the dishes he prepares are vegan, he said that he hesitates to label them as such, since people often assume vegan dishes will taste worse, but feels like he has built up enough credibility with the Alpha Phi girls to get them to try whatever he makes. However, he always over-prepares his vegetarian entrees, since they end up being popular even among the non-vegetarians of the group.

“I don’t know how much people are going to like tofu, but they love it,” Wharton junior and Sammy brother Ben Gardner said.

Cooking Greek

Working in Greek houses can sometimes be a crazy experience, Tarantelli noted. At one Penn fraternity he worked at, which he preferred to leave unnamed, citing “frat boy drama,” Tarantelli constantly found the kitchen where he was expected to work covered in beer and vodka, red solo cups littering the perpetually sticky floors.

Another time, the same fraternity lost heat for a week and he had to bring a space heater from home, though he said he could still see his breath the whole time he was cooking. Another time, they found a baby bird that had flown into the kitchen and got caught on a sticky glue trap — Tarantelli recalled that one brother wanted to bash it with a pan, but it was able to fly free when Tarnatelli put oil on its feet.

Even working at a sorority has had its drama. At one Cornell University sorority where he cooked prior to coming to Penn, the girls had to walk through the kitchen to get to their rooms, so Tarantelli witnessed his share of girls in various states of intoxication or wearing the same clothes as the night before traversing through the kitchen in the early hours of the morning.

He said that the two Greek houses he works at now are a “godsend” compared to some of the places he used to work.

“A zen kind of thing”

For Tarantelli, cooking natural food is more than just a profession — it’s what he’s meant to do. He turned to vegan eating and cooking when he was 17, influenced by the punk and alternative scene that he was first introduced to through music. Back then, he said, being a vegan was much tougher than it is today, with vegan restaurants abounding and stores like Whole Foods selling so many meat and dairy substitutes.

After two undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, Tarantelli decided that his passion lay in cooking and moved out to California to attend the Vega Study Center, where he learned a Japanese-based healing diet that is meant to help people with severe illnesses by giving them ultra-clean diets with foods like rice and seaweed.

After learning the method and whittling down to 120 pounds, he decided that the diet was a bit too extreme for his liking — “being a vegan is restrictive enough as it is,” he noted. After moving to Ithaca, New York, he landed his first job in the Greek system, cooking for one of Cornell’s sorority houses, before moving on to the Penn Greek system in 2009.

“I feel like that’s what I’m best at ... it’s just natural when I’m cooking,” he said. “It’s a zen kind of thing.”

Though writing a cookbook seemed like a natural next step for the veteran chef, writing the book turned out to be a lot more difficult than he initially expected.

“It was really hard to do a cookbook because I don’t cook with recipes in mind at all,” Tarantelli said, using hand motions to demonstrate throwing in a little bit of this, a little bit of that. He added that figuring out how to write recipes for his dishes this past summer was an effort in trial-and-error, guessing and checking the recipes that he wrote down.

Though cooking is his job, Tarantelli thinks it can play a bigger part in everyone’s lives.

“I think it’s important that people cook for themselves,” he said. “I don’t want to say spiritual and sound like a hippie — but that’s what you should be doing; it’s not really natural for someone else to make it. Hundreds of years ago, that’s what your day revolved around. It seems like more of a peaceful existence.”

Although being a vegan is Tarantelli’s lifestyle choice, he doesn’t necessarily encourage people to become vegans themselves. Instead, he recommends that people start by getting five vegetables a day into their diet, a guideline that he says is a great first step to eating healthier.

Tarantelli left me with a copy of his book, recommending a few recipes I could feasibly try to prepare in my ant-sized high-rise kitchen. Later that evening, I heated up his vegan blueberry crumb cake, and couldn't help but swoon at the warm, gooey dessert — even for an omnivore, it was absolutely heavenly.

Simple to Gourmet Vegan can be purchased by emailing patarantelli@gmail.com or through his Twitter account @GourmetSimple

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.