Marc Oswald was the executive chef at Happy Hollow Country Club in Omaha from 2006 to 2013. The job, which required 70 to 80 hours of work per week, meant preparing meals for banquets and events, sometimes for over 400 guests. Before that, Oswald had worked other jobs with similar hours, going back two decades. In 2013, he decided to resign as the executive chef to cut back his hours.

First, Oswald was part of the opening team at Avoli Osteria, an Italian restaurant in Dundee that opened in 2013. At Avoli Osteria, a restaurant owned by the chef-owner at Dario’s in Dundee Dario Schicke, Oswald “helped realize food concepts envisioned by Dario Schicke and Ben Maides,” according to his LinkedIn profile (Maides is the other chef at Avoli Osteria). The restaurant was named Restaurant of the Year in 2013 by the Omaha World Herald.

Now, Oswald is the assistant manager for the Westside cafeteria. Oswald’s path to the Westside cafeteria has been unusual, as he didn’t start working as a chef.

In 1978 Oswald graduated from Creighton University, where he had studied photography. After working in California, he moved on to Modern Era, a company located in a suburb of Atlanta. But during the recession of the early ’90s, Oswald was laid-off.

“I found myself scrambling for the first time really,” Oswald said.

With the rapid shift to digital photography, he didn’t know where the industry would go. So he gave food a try. In 1993, he entered the School of Culinary Arts at the Art Institute of Atlanta, and went to earn his Associate of Arts in Culinary/Chef Training.

“[Going to culinary school] was kind of strange,” Oswald said. “I was probably the oldest student there at the time. I was in my mid-30s.”

He graduated in 1994. Since then, Oswald has worked all over the United States, and even did a stage, which is “an unpaid internship when a cook or chef works briefly … in another chef’s kitchen to learn and be exposed to new techniques and cuisines,” according to Wikipedia, in Italy.

In the United States, he has worked at Bluehour, an upscale restaurant in Portland, the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta, and in New York City. The head chef at the Ritz-Carlton was Italian, and chose to move back to Italy to start his own restaurant. He asked Oswald to join him. Oswald spent three months doing his stage at Trattoria all’Angelo.

Through his work with these restaurants and Happy Hollow, Oswald has been involved with a farm-to-table approach to cooking. In Italy, he would go to a warehouse that had “palates of vegetables.” At Bluehour, the products came from 60 different growers. At Happy Hollow, most of his products were bought from Chef’s Garden, one of the largest organic farms in the United States, located in Huron, Ohio.

In coming to Westside, Oswald has met a similar approach to food as with his past culinary ventures.

“It’s kind of interesting that I’m at the school now, because what I see is what I’ve been involved in for many years, and that is high-quality, dense, nutrient-rich, farm-to-table products,” Oswald said.

Currently, Oswald is still finding his set duties for the cafeteria. 

“Since I’ve only been here a few months, [my role has] yet to be determined,” Oswald said. “I have a lot of contacts, so above and beyond the set companies that [the cafeteria does] business with, there are some others that we can bring in, but it all depends on dollar price-points and things like that.”

His goal for the cafeteria is aligned with that of head chef Sharon Schaefer. The two are hoping to bring more action station foods to students.

“If we’re doing omelets, [we want to] do them in front of you,” Oswald said. “Things of that nature.”

Furthermore, he wants to bring more fresh vegetables and fewer processed foods. Oswald knows, though, that there are things students dislike, and will strive to cater to students wants.

“We work for the students at Westside, we work for Westside district and we basically do what we feel the students at Westside want,” Oswald said. “So it’s kind of trying to straddle that line of I know what’s good, but I also know what you won’t eat.”

Updated Friday, Feb. 28 at 3:32: The second to last paragraph originally stated that Oswald wanted to bring more processed foods to the cafeteria. This statement was incorrect, and has been revised to say that he wants to bring fewer processed foods to the cafeteria.