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Outsourcing lunch is a hot-button topic in schools. But few have gone as far as a handful of North Shore private schools that have contracted with Dom's Trattoria in Beverly Farms to offer restaurant-quality food to their students. Chef and owner Angela Dominick prepares child-friendly meals for Glen Urquhart, Waring School, Cape Ann Waldorf School, Stoneridge Montessori, and Harbor Light Montessori.

These institutions lack on-site kitchen facilities (fewer than half of Boston public schools have full kitchens). Most public schools that have no kitchens bring in food from a commissary or outside contractor. In that sense the situation is no different from the schools Dominick serves, except that she’s using whole-grain products, cutting sugar and sodium, and adding fiber and fresh vegetables.

She offers the lunchroom staple American chop suey, jazzing it up with purple cauliflower. Her mac and cheese also leans on cauliflower, pureed in the creamy cheese sauce. Whole grains rule, and garden salads with tuna or grilled chicken are always an option. Parents or students go online at the beginning of each week and place their orders on Dominick’s website.

The chef makes stock from scratch and uses no frozen products. She thinks her model can work for public schools, too, and says she would "be more than willing to work with a public school department." And, she says, "I can do it for about the same price kids would pay for lunch in public school."

Certainly, much of what Dominick does could work in any lunchroom. But her menu prices for a hot meal range up to $5, while a hot meal at Beverly High School is $2.75. In order for Dominick to meet public school prices, she would have to retool her menu.

She says, however, it's more about will than economics: "I truly believe that all it really takes is just a little bit of extra effort."

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BEVERLY — As a young girl growing up in Maine, Angela Dominick learned the food business by working in restaurants owned by her family. Whenever she complained, her father ordered her to stand in front of a mirror and practice speaking in a more civilized tone.

Those childhood lessons, both culinary and oratory, are now paying off. Dominick is not only the chef and owner of her own restaurant. She's also the host of her own local cable TV cooking show.

"La Cucina Famiglia" (The Family Kitchen) is produced by Beverly Community Access Media and is shown in about 40 communities on the North Shore. Dominick has taped seven shows, using the home kitchens of some of her customers as the setting.

Yesterday, she co-hosted the show along with Rob Worsley, the sous chef at Dom's Trattoria, the Beverly Farms restaurant co-owned by Dominick and her husband, Ralph. Inside the kitchen of local architect John Margolis, the pair whipped up Sicilian and Thai versions of Dominick's homemade fish stew.

The show's producer, Don Berman, said Dominick is a natural in front of the camera.

"What you're looking for is a personality, and Angela has that charisma," Berman said. "You need somebody who can talk while they're working. Angela has those qualities."

To Dominick, the cooking show is a natural outgrowth of her desire to share her love and knowledge of food. She has invited kids into her restaurant for make-your-own pizza parties and is allowing a former waitress the use of her kitchen to develop her own granola business.

"I grew up in Maine, and I try to bring as much community and small-town-ness to everything I do," Dominick said. "If you do something and you're passionate about it, it's important to share."

Dominick opened her own restaurant in Kennebunk in 1994 and ran it with her late father, whom she called her "best friend and business partner." In 2003, she married Beverly Farms native Ralph Dominick, and three years later they opened Dom's Trattoria on West Street in Beverly Farms square.

Dominick said her ingredients are all locally grown and all her dishes are homemade. "If we don't make it," she said, "we don't sell it."

She said she strives to create a family atmosphere, with an emphasis on children. (She has no children herself, but "lots of nieces and nephews.") She has volunteered to create lunches at local nursery schools and is in the running to develop the lunch program at two local private schools.

"It's important to teach children that meals don't come out of a box on a shelf," she said.

Dominick acknowledges that her cable cooking show is good marketing for her restaurant. But she also wants to make the wider point that food should be an experience shared by the entire family.

"It's all about wanting to get people back around the dinner table," she said.

Staff writer Paul Leighton can be reached at 978-338-2675 or by e-mail at pleighton@salemnews.com.

Angela Dominick and Rob Worsley demonstrate cooking during the "La Cucina Famiglia" cooking show being shot in a Beverly kitchen for an upcoming episode.

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PUBLISHER LINK: www.BeverlyFarms.org

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