Scholarship and Stipend Recipients
Since 2003 the Austin chapter has given $288,000 in scholarships and culinary stipends. In 2023 our giving totaled $50,000 in grants to women. These funds support the growth of careers and ongoing studies for women in hospitality, culinary, and beverage.
2022 Scholarship Recipients
Merisauh Gamble - $4000 Culinary School Scholarship (2022)
As a high school senior, I went to Lively Technical College for its culinary program. My teachers there guided me to a world of creativity and passion within food so I stayed for their baking and pastry program, only to grow more serious, eventually moving to Texas to attend Auguste Escoffier Culinary School. I came here to gain more knowledge in the kitchen and the business world in the food industry. Today, I am a morning baker at La Patisserie in Austin, Texas. I've learned how to build cakes and fruit tarts, roll out croissant dough, and make multiple pastries.
This scholarship would support my goals of traveling outside the country, supporting many chefs in their work, and helping guide my understanding and bond with the food I eat. I plan on working in various bakeries to unfold the sole purpose of the amazing chefs I encounter and understand their stories and what they reveal in their products for their customers. My goal is to acknowledge and support the mission of my teachers and guides that are helping me grow as a person, a baker, and a pastry cook.
Kimberly Zash - $4000 A La Carte Scholarship (2022)
Kimberly Zash is the Head Roaster at Greater Goods Coffee Roasters, where she leads the roasting operations in roast profile development, quality control, and training, as well as green coffee buying, cupping, and logistics. In addition to her job at Greater Goods, she is the co-founder of Sightseer Coffee Roasters. Sightseer is dedicated to providing impact-driven specialty coffee that is farmed, sourced, and roasted by women. It set out to uplift and empower those with marginalized identities throughout the coffee supply chain by providing training, hiring, and utilizing marginalized-led company partnerships wherever possible.
I would use this scholarship to purchase a membership to the Coffee Roaster’s Guild which allows me to be a member of the professional community of coffee roasters, a chance to join committees, participate in national competitions, and access cutting-edge coffee science. Additionally, I would like to attend the SCA Specialty Coffee Expo Conference in Boston. This would allow me to attend lectures and make connections that would be vital to the growth of my professional network and new business. Finally, a long-term goal would be to utilize whatever is available after those two projects to pay for part of my Q grader certification, or the travel to it. The Q grader certification is the world standard for grading the quality of coffee on a numerical scale. This would allow me to be calibrated with Q graders worldwide and could not only better inform my green buying and roasting decisions, but also allow me to pass that knowledge on to the women and other marginalized folks that I will hopefully be employing and uplifting through Sightseer Coffee.
Casie Wiginton - $2000 A La Carte Scholarship (2022)
Casie Wiginton is the Account Manager and Beverage Buyer at Antonelli’s Cheese Shop, selecting high-quality, cheese-friendly wines and hosting fun and educational classes that demystify otherwise intimidating subject matters. She is ingrained in the food and beverage industry for 24+ years, running taprooms, retail teams, catering programs, wholesale, marketing, and education teams. She was sponsored by Whole Foods to sit for (and passed) the first-generation Certified Cheese Professional Exam, was a judge for the American Cheese Society, is a Certified Cider Professional, and sat for the Pommelier Exam. She has represented her company on procurement trips, both domestically and internationally. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA in Archeology and is trilingual. Education is her passion; both for her own edification and to enrich those around her. She has insatiably collected knowledge over the years and wants nothing more than to share that with those around her.
As the beverage buyer for Antonelli’s Cheese, studying for and passing my WSET exams will help us stay pertinent in the ever-evolving wine market as well as attract new customers to our retail shop. We are widely known in the Cheese industry as having some of the most knowledgeable Mongers behind our counters and on our Zoom screens. I would like to now have the opportunity to expand that knowledge base to our wine wall as well. There is so much potential and so many sales opportunities that we are missing out on and I firmly believe that by gleaning the information required in order to pass the WSET, we can grow our sales by leaps and bounds.
Angel Young - $2000 Culinary Student Scholarship (2022)
Currently, I'm working on attaining my associate’s degree in culinary arts. One of my goals with my degree is to become as well-rounded as I possibly can in what I do and to do it well. My intermediate goal for my professional career is to learn as much as possible from my externships in Austin’s restaurants. I want to hone my skills as a chef so I can do well wherever I go, and I want to continue learning as much as I can from each place I visit. Lastly, my long-term goals for my professional career are to experience the different job categories and to finally become a chef for catering and banquets.
This scholarship will support my goals for my career by ensuring that I can focus more on culinary arts and less on the financial burden. Upon graduation, I plan to return to Escoffier to earn my degree in pastry arts.
Celia Bell - $2000 Culinary Professional Scholarship (2022)
Celia Bell is the Operations Manager at Two Hives Honey, a hyperlocal honey company based in Austin, Texas, which produces small-batch, seasonal honey using natural beekeeping practices. Before signing on at Two Hives, Celia received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Texas at Austin. She balances beekeeping and writing, and her debut novel, The Disenchantment, is scheduled for publication in 2023. In the summer of 2020, I signed up for a six-month intensive beekeeping course with Two Hives Honey. Every Saturday that I drove out to Two Hives’ apiaries and put on my bee suit, I knew what I really wanted to do. When an operations position opened up at Two Hives, shortly after the end of my apprenticeship, it was an easy decision to apply. In the time I’ve spent at Two Hives, I’ve moved from leading tours and assisting with our honey production to managing our wholesale honey program, teaching a full roster of beekeeping classes, and designing new courses and honey-themed events for the public.
The course I want to take with the American Honey Tasting Society will help me build skills in leading honey-tasting classes—an area of my job to which I still feel very new, and which I want to get better at. The Texas Master Beekeeping Certification, meanwhile, will help me improve my beekeeping skills, pushing me to learn more about how beekeepers across Texas manage their bees and connecting me with others in the industry.
I also hope to use some of the Les Dames funds to offset the cost of setting up my own personal hives—a prerequisite for the Master Beekeeper certification, but also an important research opportunity, as having my own bees to work with will allow me to gain more experience with beekeeping techniques that we may eventually want to implement at Two Hives, such as the two-queen system for boosting honey production.
I hope that my continued learning will help make our hives more resilient and productive, without sacrificing the principles of sustainability and natural beekeeping that we believe in. And I hope that I can become more effective as a teacher, and leave more people with a knowledge and appreciation of the insects that are so important to so much of our food system.
Aswini Sivasamy - $2000 Beverage Scholarship (2022)
An entrepreneur and wellness advocate with a passion for facilitating positive impacts in individuals and communities, Aswini Sivaswamy is the founder and owner of Sesa, a blossoming business based in Austin, Texas. Sesa is a beverage purveyor focused on servicing local independent restaurants and cafes with alternative source-direct, plant-based non-alcoholic beverages. One of the company’s primary goals is to help promote purposeful action and sustained improvement in actively developing the overall health and well-being of individuals and communities. Building social, cultural, and individual capacity through collaborative projects that support holistic healthy living is one of Aswini’s top priorities. The ultimate long-term goal is to provide support through an array of offerings that help individuals and communities develop daily rituals to have and sustain mind and body wellness. And in particular, I want to be sure to emphasize and keep in connection with the richness of eastern ancestral remedies to improve and maintain health and wellness.
The focus of the funding from this grant would steer my mission towards reaching more customers by reinstating and completing certifications for our products and incorporating health coaching into what I already have been studying and inherently practice today. These courses have been thoughtfully researched and considered to build a tiered approach to improve the opportunities to engage deeper into the above-mentioned objectives to expand offerings to more partners and to inform and share how beverage, nutrition, and mind and body health and wellness are all interconnected.
Naijean Bernard - $2000 Beverage Scholarship (2022)
Naijean Bernard, Ph.D. is a psychologist turned beverage entrepreneur. She is best known for successfully launching Jeany’s Caribbean Elixirs, a premium beverage brand focusing on Caribbean-inspired flavors influenced by her immigrant background. Naijean has been featured in local news media such as the Austin Statesman, Austin Chronicle, and Fox 7 News Austin, along with cultural travel blogs such as Travel Noire. Her beverages can be found at local farmers’ markets and at some of Austin’s hippest and trendiest restaurants, bars, hotels, and coffeehouses.
Our goal for Jeany’s Caribbean Elixirs is to expand into specialty grocery stores, such as Whole Foods and Central Market, beginning in 2022. While we still intend to make fresh batches of our elixirs in-house to serve the local Austin TX market, in order for us to be successful in grocery stores, our products will need to be co-manufactured (i.e., co-packing) and pasteurized. Due to the financial investment involved in co-manufacturing, we have been waiting to start co-packing as we continue to raise funds for our retail expansion in Texas. After we have gained a strong market share in Texas, we plan to expand into the Southwest Region in specialty grocery stores (i.e., Texas to Colorado). In five to seven years, we plan to distribute our elixirs nationwide.
The LDEA Beverage Professional Scholarship would provide our business with the funds to be able to purchase online mentoring services from JK Juices. This woman-owned juice company is known to be an industry leader in the cold-pressed beverage space.
Aurora Torado - $2000 Travel Scholarship (2022)
My name is Aurora Torrado and I am currently one of the lead Pastry Chefs for the Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group in Austin, Texas. After graduating from Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts with an associate’s degree in 2018, I met Chef Sarah Heard and began working for her. She quickly became my mentor and with a lot of her encouragement, I found my way to the Emmer team. Their use of exclusively Texas-grown products, the attention to detail every individual carried in, and the talented Executive Pastry Chef really drew me into this environment that I knew would only support my growth. There is still a lot to be learned from the team that surrounds me but before taking this next step in my career, I feel as though I need different perspectives on creating, researching, and developing in order to begin to carve my own path.
My goals for these coming years are to find myself as a leader and excel in this position I’ve worked so hard for. My ability to support the growth of the newer generation of pastry chefs in our organization is something I’m very passionate about and will be one of my main focuses for this journey. As I started to learn more about my food culture, other people's ties to food, and how it makes us feel, I’ve realized that submerging myself in other people’s experiences is one of the main tools that allow me to create freely and consistently. For this reason, I want to travel to the Chicago Chocolate Academy in order to learn from three entirely different chefs with completely different backgrounds and motivations as well as expose myself to different ways of thinking.
Chi Ndika - $2000 Travel Scholarship (2022)
I was born and raised in Austin by my Kenyan mom and Nigerian dad. I'm the baby of the family and grew up cooking and baking with my dad who raised me in the kitchen, oftentimes he would cook one-handed while holding me in the other arm. My passion for food and good quality beverages comes from my mom who is a nutritionist and she always reminded me and my sister that food should be nourishing and healing to the soul.
I'm the founder and CEO of Luv Fats ice cream. I was born and raised in Austin. My mom is Kenyan and my dad is Nigerian. My dad taught me how to cook and bake from scratch at a young age. That's why I try to make our own mix-ins and toppings as much as possible since things made from scratch just taste better and you can taste the luv in each bite. It also makes me feel closer to my dad even though we don't get to spend much time together these days. A lot of my flavors are inspired by things I ate as a child and things my parents grew up eating and drinking. Some of our most popular flavors are flavors that I grew up with like chocolate chai ice cream or plantain ice cream.
Luv Fats is a small-batch dairy-free ice cream made with avocado and coconut milk. Inspired by my mom, I founded the company to create a creamier dairy-free alternative. I source ingredients for our specialty flavors from local farmers and vendors. Luv Fats offers healthy-ish, decadent, and texturally rich flavors made with lots of luv. We aim to share the joy and nostalgia many of us experienced in our childhood with a treat everyone can enjoy.
Michelle Hall - $2000 Michelle Lee Memorial Scholarship (2022)
I attended Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena, California, so I could stay closer to my mom and earned my Associate’s Degree in Culinary Arts at 19 years old. While I originally intended to follow a more savory path, my interest in precision and plating sent me toward a more pastry-driven route.
Following Le Cordon Bleu, I worked at a number of reputable eateries across California including A.O.C under Susan Goin, Michelin-starred restaurants Michael Mina, Masas, Campton Place, and opened Quince & Cotogna. In 2012, my husband and I made the move to Austin to plant our roots. I first started as the assistant pastry chef at Congress and Second Bar + Kitchen under Erica Waksmunski and then helped reopen Jeffreys. Exactly 1year later, I was honored to come back home as the Executive Pastry Chef for award-winning Executive Chef David Bull back at Congress and SBK. I then was given the opportunity to become the Executive Pastry Chef at the Archer Hotel. During my time working for La Corsha, I helped open properties with them such as ABIA Second Bar + Kitchen and Stage Coach Inn. During the pandemic, I was furloughed as many were in the industry. However, I was blessed to find my dream job where I currently reside in Austin as a Pastry Chef Instructor for Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts, proudly teaching the next and upcoming generation of Pastry Chefs.
My long-term goal is to get my American Culinary Federation certification as an Executive Pastry Chef. With this scholarship, I would promise to invest it into my student’s education (and mine) by getting more modern tools and, if possible, getting my certification from ACF.
*About Michelle Lee and The Michelle Lee Legacy Scholarship
Michelle Soojee Lee was a quiet force on the Austin culinary scene. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Michelle moved around the US landing in Austin after attending a year at NYU art school. She began working in Operations at Central Market on South Lamar and quickly fell into the role of a Foodie. Michelle wrote and orchestrated hundreds of recipes and food events, taught countless customers and friends about the joys of cooking, and always found new and exciting ways to connect with her customers and peers through food. Michelle wasn't afraid of the hustle outside of her daily job, and was a personal chef and caterer, pastry chef, and entrepreneur working on bottling her own Korean hot sauce, and was always willing to lend a hand where needed with Les Dames d' Escoffier Austin Chapter. She was led by her huge heart and selfless nature, using her culinary talents to organize and donate to fundraisers for basic human rights, female empowerment, Black Lives Matter, and Austin Pets Alive, to name a few.
The Michelle Lee Legacy scholarship is for the female candidate in the culinary/hospitality/grocery industry who is guided by the greater good and isn't afraid to hustle. She is an under-represented BIPOC culinarian or an advocate of the greater advancement of equality and human rights.