The first glimmer of the idea that became EDWINS came with Brandon Chrostowski's arrest. He was 18 years old, just a kid in Detroit, charged with fleeing when they couldn't get him on a drug dealing charge. The judge offered him a second chance–but only if he got a job.

Today, Chrostowski is the man behind EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute in Cleveland, Ohio. His French restaurant–the subject of praise from the New York Times and an Oscar-nominated documentary, Knife Skills–is a culinary training program for men and women who've served time. It's a detour from the U-turn that 43 percent of former prisoners make back behind bars, and Chrostowski, a Culinary Institute of America graduate himself, says he's building the best culinary school in the country. "CIA, Johnson & Wales, they can eat our shit," he told me. "It has to be better than great, because people look at us as half as good."



"It has to be better than great, because people look at us as half as good."

Half the students make it through the program's first three weeks, and another 10 to 20 percent drop off later. But of those who graduate the six-month course, only one percent end up back in prison. The other ninety-nine have gone on to work in New York, Paris, and beyond.

Chrostowski teaches students at EDWINS. Zach Duvall

With a prison system so broken, how does a fancy restaurant jam the revolving door of incarceration?



There's no easy solution, Chrostowski says. All he can offer is a crash course built from the pieces of his own rocky path. That second chance he got from the judge turned into bussing at a fine dining restaurant. Two years later, when the chef couldn't teach him any more, “he kicked me out,” he says. “It was the only time I ever cried in a restaurant.”



But that lead to culinary school, which gave him the confidence to apprentice for the late Charlie Trotter. People who worked for the legendary chef know that they can push through anything, adds Chrostowski.

From there it was onto Michelin-starred kitchens in Paris and New York, where Chrostowski poured $5,000 bottles of wine while he lived in relative poverty–the greatest restaurants pay the least, he says. Meanwhile he'd get calls about friends in Detroit being killed, "a sous chef who gets stabbed over five bucks." These stark contrasts “tear on a person's heart if they're receptive to it," he says. "It did something to me."

Chrostowski says he couldn't stop thinking about his own story–and how differently things could have gone if he'd never been given the chance to try again. "I was convinced this was what I had to do."

He zeroed in on Cleveland; it had the worst high school graduation rate, so he figured the greatest need. EDWINS opened with its first class in November 2013. Today, in almost every Ohio prison, there's a class, a culinary club, or textbooks and DVDs for self-study.

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"The toughest thing is to build esteem in six months [in] someone who's been ripped apart," says Chrostowski, who focuses on personality development as much as culinary education. As soon as a student is comfortable working in one position, they're onto the next. "Keep on breaking, rebuilding, breaking, rebuilding, and meanwhile you're teaching a skill."

Those skills cover every element of running a restaurant, from cooking, to service, to inspecting and polishing wine glasses for delivery. Beyond the kitchen, EDWINS, operating as a 501(c)(3), also allows students to take advantage of free housing, legal services, medical care, clothing, career coaching, literacy programs, and more.

Since that first class, EDWINS has graduated nearly 200 students, with no plans of slowing down. And it's all happening before a live audience, each and every night.

"It's a great play that we host here," Chrostowski says. "But when you start dreaming and you start achieving those dreams, it starts to become reality that you can succeed and you will succeed. That's where this whole play becomes incredibly powerful."

"They think, 'If I can do this, what's next?'"

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