Cañon City
One of the cleanest and best-run restaurants in Colorado seldom gets much acclaim for its culinary success. Maybe it’s the slightly unorthodox way the waiters serve the food – shoving it through a slot in a thick metal door after the diner is ordered to back away.
Or perhaps it’s the way the kitchen employees are strip-searched before and after each shift.
Or how the food-prep knives are bolted to the wall on short sections of steel cable. (This ensures that if the chef is slicing a piece of, say, liver, the liver is not still inside a snitch named Larry from Cellblock H.)
Welcome to the kitchen of the maximum-security Colorado State Penitentiary, cited recently by state health officials for excellence in food-preparation safety and for its stellar sanitation record.
The kitchen boss, Capt. Glinda Vendetti of the Colorado Department of Corrections, and her employees got this glowing report from the state Department of Public Health and Environment: “Captain Vendetti and her staff have proven consistently during inspections and throughout the year that they have food safety at the top of their priority list.”
Don’t think that kind of dedication by Vendetti and her staff goes unnoticed by the 756 grateful inmates in the state pen. While seldom taking the time to pen an actual thank-you note, some of them do go out of their way to show their appreciation.
“Sometimes they send back the trays with their own feces and urine on them,” said Vendetti, standing in the kitchen of the home she shares with her husband and fellow prison guard, Greg.
Help gets 60 cents a day
Vendetti, 42, started in the food business 20 years ago as a waitress at a restaurant named Mr. Ed’s. (You can make your own joke, but you might consider a punch line that includes the phrase “mane course.”)
In 1996 she was hired to run the kitchen of a Cañon City mental institution. “Most of the patients were put there and forgotten about,” she said. “I really liked them. They had nobody else.”
She joined the Department of Corrections a year later as food director at the Four Mile Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison adjacent to the much harsher state penitentiary. She was promoted to food director at the maximum-security prison in 2000 and oversees a staff of three DOC workers and 22 to 27 inmates.
The kitchen inmates are not, however, state penitentiary inmates. Those high-risk inmates are locked in their cells 23 hours a day and allowed to wander around the yard, under guard, for the other hour.
The kitchen help comes from the nearby Four Mile prison, where inmates have work privileges. They are paid 60 cents a day. (It doesn’t sound like much, but if they work eight hours a day, five days a week, at the end of a year they could pocket $156 – if their prison pants had pockets.)
The kitchen screening process makes sure none of them have relatives locked up at the maximum-security prison. Explained Greg Vendetti: “You don’t want them taping any drugs or other contraband onto their Uncle Freddie’s tray.”
Three times a day the staff prepares some 1,500 trays – a tray for a hot dish and another for a cold dish – all pushed through the slots in the cell doors.
Breakfast includes eggs or French toast or breakfast burritos. Lunch usually means burgers or a sandwich. Dinners can be chicken-fried steak or pizza. Or – gasp – baked chicken.
“They hate the baked chicken,” Vendetti said. “The leg has a vein and even overcooked it still looks pink and undercooked. That really bothers them.”
On a more positive note, many of the diners have time to get used to the baked chicken. An example would be 60 years to life.
And each Sunday they get ice cream. They don’t get to pick the flavor.
“For people that sometimes have little to look forward to, ice cream on Sunday can be a big deal,” Vendetti said.
She runs her kitchen with this thought: “I taste everything. If I wouldn’t eat it, I don’t expect the inmates to eat it. I’ll throw it out.”
Soups from the cooler
And once in a while in the huge underground kitchen beneath the state pen, leftovers pile up in the massive refrigerators – refrigerators Vendetti has numbered and refers to as “coolers.” On leftover days she empties a cooler, takes out bathtub-sized kettles and makes soup.
“I like making soup,” she said. “You can get creative.”
And what does she call the soups?
“Nothing fancy,” she said, smiling. “Last week we made Cooler Two soup.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
