At 1:30 a.m., Phillip Luna begins his workday, preparing 5,000 to 6,000 school lunches. Alongside his 68 employees, Luna loads containers of freshly prepared food into 12 vans, all ready to head to schools by 8 a.m.
Photography by Kathy Tran
The operation begins hours before most students arrive at school. Luna’s team prepares each meal from scratch, making everything from sauces to sandwiches in the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Lake Highlands kitchen. But Luna’s career did not always revolve around school lunch.
Before he was feeding thousands of children each day, Luna was a young chef studying at the Culinary Institute of America in New York.
After graduating and spending some time in Utah, Luna moved to Washington, D.C., where he started his first business, Seasonings Caterers, where he prepared meals for inaugural parties, senators and ambassadors.
“I ended up losing that business at the end of the ’80s with the [Savings and Loan] bank scandals,” Luna says. “Washington kind of stopped having parties, and we had a quarter million dollars worth of business disappear in two weeks.”
At the time, Luna was only in his early 20s, and with the loss of his first major business, he decided to move back to New York and become a bike messenger for a year. During this time, he says he was looking for a city where he could re-group and start over again.
“I looked at Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas and Las Vegas, and Dallas just had the economies here,” he says. “I’m originally from San Antonio, so it just made a lot of sense to me.”
After moving to Dallas in 1991, Luna founded Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Caterers two years later. The company initially focused on weddings, private parties and corporate events. However, nearly two decades later, a lunch with his children at Mockingbird Elementary — then-called Stonewall Jackson Elementary — would push Luna to rethink the direction of his business.
“My kids were constantly complaining about school lunch, and I would tell them, ‘We’ve all gone through that,’ but I didn’t realize how bad it was until I actually ate with them,” he says.
Luna was shocked by what he saw. Vegetables that were supposed to be fresh and green were overcooked and brown.
So Luna began cooking lunches for his children’s school. Soon, other parents caught on and asked Luna to prepare their children’s lunches, too. After cooking for several students, however, Luna realized he was putting more time and effort into the meals than the arrangement was worth.
“I had the idea to approach the school and see if they would be interested in me taking over their lunch program,” Luna says.
The school agreed and soon, word began to spread, and other schools started approaching Luna about their lunch programs.
What started as an effort to improve his own children’s school lunches has since grown into a full-scale operation serving 17 private schools, such as The Covenant School, Dallas Christian School, St. John’s Episcopal School and more across the Dallas area. Currently, Luna’s team offers students a rotating monthly menu, incorporating vegetable purees such as cauliflower puree into its shells and cheese and mashed potatoes. The company does not serve fried, processed or canned foods.
Luna calls the program “Food for Thought.”
Behind the scenes, the operation runs on a carefully timed system. Luna and his team use a color-coded dot system to keep track of which meals are headed to which schools. Purple, for example, identifies meals for St. Thomas Aquinas, while other colors correspond to other schools.
The kitchen crew begins with the day’s menu and starts with the prep that takes the most time.
“Sauces are obviously started first because sauces take time,” Luna says.
From there, Luna’s cold crew makes sandwiches, while the daily menu includes two hot entrees, a vegetarian option, a sandwich and a salad. Depending on the school, students can also choose from hot paninis, pasta, soup and a selection of snacks, including baked chips, guacamole, cheese and crackers, and hummus with pretzels.
Luna also handles the logistics of the lunch program, from communicating with parents to managing each student’s lunch account. The company contracts with schools, but parents set up their student’s lunch account and add money as needed. At lunch, students enter their lunch numbers and pay for their food through the account.
“Some parents will, you know, throw $20,000 into an account, and other parents will add weekly,” he says.
When Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Caterers begins working with a new school, the company receives a list of enrolled students and their parents’ email addresses. The company then contacts parents to explain the lunch program and how to set up their children’s accounts.
“We handle all questions from parents, and we let the teachers concentrate on being teachers and the admins concentrate on being admins,” he says. “My older sister and my mother were in education, and it’s just something that I know how hard it is.”
Despite the demands of running a business that begins before sunrise, Luna still makes time for the hobbies that first drew him to Lake Highlands.
Luna has raced bikes for most of his life and spends a lot of time at White Rock Lake training. Besides racing, he also spends his time gardening at his mid-century modern home that he shares with his wife Sarah, located in Lochwood.
“I’m in the process of building a greenhouse right now, so that I can have all my own fresh herbs for the company and my personal cooking,” he says.
His work is less about the grand parties and elaborate dishes he was used to making. Instead, it’s about making sure thousands of children have a healthy meal waiting for them when they walk into the cafeteria.
“Food is fuel,” Luna says. “We’re fueling these children to go to school and be in a good mood.”
