Did You Know? is now a column that highlights our many interesting parents. If you’d like to submit information for our spring issue, please email it to Casper Caldarola.
well, I had an early appreciation for vegetables, good food and the restaurant business. It was this love of whole foods and the community feeling of restaurants that lead me to launch a restaurant concept after college with my best friend. Chopt, which we opened in 2001, explores the globe’s most craveable seasonal ingredients, best local farmer’s markets and craftiest neighborhood specialists to create the world’s best salad. Today, Chopt is more than 30 restaurants, with more than one thousand employees, in multiple markets in the U.S. and growing steadily. Our mission remains the same as it did when we started, to change the way America eats. Fortunately, the growth of Chopt has allowed us to do charitable work with children in less privileged schools and to help educate them about the importance of eating well; just as Monica did with me, and does with my son Miles, today. But Miles still needs to eat his veggies!
Lamplighter
Colin McCabe ’90, P’24 Co-Founder Chopt Creative Salad Company
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For years, I kept a horrible secret: even though I was the editor-inchief of a prominent food magazine, I wasn't a great cook. I ruined nearly every dish I attempted to make from breakfast to midnight snack, from fish to cookies. In my first cookbook, Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen, I finally decided to come clean about my many meal mishaps. With the help of all-star chefs who I've gotten to know during my 20 years at Food & Wine—Mario Batali, Alex Guarnaschelli, Tom Colicchio, and many others—I perfected 100 recipes that are dear to my heart. Each one has a high "yum" factor, a few key ingredients, and a simple trick that makes it special. After a year of cooking with these hero chefs, I learned a lot about mastering my mistakes not only in cooking—but also in life.
Dana Cowin P’18 Editor in Chief Food & Wine
From a very early age I would accompany my father, a dedicated cardiologist, on his weekend rounds at the hospital. Often the patients he visited would come up to me and say, “You have a wonderful father—he saved my life.” It was powerful and humbling to hear. I knew then that I wanted to help people that profoundly. I wanted to save lives. I headed off to medical school and after intense training I achieved my dream of becoming an interventional cardiologist. It was incredibly rewarding work and I thought I had it all. Well, almost. I wanted a baby. After many months of trying unsuccessfully, I started to panic. I began to research available methods and that’s when I discovered mucolytics (generally used to break up chest congestion, and found in some cough syrups) could aid in conception. To my complete amazement, it worked on the first try!
In the A-S 2014 holiday video, Revel Phan ’18 wished that his “mom would get published.” Miraculously, by December of that very year, three different literary magazines had picked up her stories! D.T. Nguyen immigrated to the U.S. as a child in 1975, after the fall of Vietnam. She is completing a collection of nonfiction short stories focusing on the themes of identity, passages, and the reconciliation of cultures and values that ensue. Find her debut pieces in “Creative Nonfiction” Spring 2015 Issue 55, “The Briar Cliff Review” 2015 Volume 27, and “REED Magazine” Volume 68.
That’s why I started PregPrep. PregPrep is empowering women all over the country to take control of their bodies as they begin their conception journeys. I was lucky enough to fulfill two lifelong dreams: becoming a doctor and becoming a mother. I’ve found that it is just as rewarding helping women get pregnant and creating new lives as it is helping to save lives.
Dr. Lara Oboler P’19, P’21 Founder PregPrep
Aima Raza P’24 Founder & CEO The Peace Project
For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard the call of entrepreneurship. As a child growing up, I loved having a little lemonade stand and learned not to be afraid to take an idea and make that idea a reality. Since then, I have been lucky to live my entrepreneurial dream, first as a Co-founder of the luxury e-commerce site, Gilt. Today I am fortunate to be a Cofounder and CEO of GLAMSQUAD, a mobile beauty service that provides women in New York City, LA and Miami with high quality and convenient blowouts, makeup and nail services in the comfort of their own home, office or hotel. If you haven't tried GLAMSQUAD yet, hopefully you will by checking out our app or website www.glamsquad.com! In my spare time, I do what I can to support other entrepreneurs in New York City by serving as an advisor and mentor to founders and early-stage start-ups.
Alexandra Wilkis Wilson P’25 CEO & Co-founder GLAMSQUAD Author of New York Times bestseller "By Invitation Only: How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop"
Suzy Nguyen P’18
To this day, I can remember Monica Matthew telling me to ‘eat the rainbow’ when I was a young boy in the Allen-Stevenson dining room. With a school and parents that extolled the virtues of eating
decades. So, a few years ago I launched a peace initiative— The Peace Project, Inc., with the support and guidance of friends. The idea behind the Peace Project is quite simple: promote peace through community-building and shared-human-values education. Our goal is to create safe and peaceful communities by promoting peace education in schools and sponsoring community-based initiatives in the United States and around the world. To that end, we have been running peace education, teacher training and girls’ empowerment workshops at partner schools and have launched a scholarship program to help girls and boys stay in school longer. We believe in the future of our children.
I grew up in Pakistan, where peace has been elusive for over a decade but where education, especially for girls, continues to be desired, art continues to thrive and freedom of expression is highly regarded despite the international political mayhem the country has experienced in the last two