August 18, 2026 | By Jennifer Levin

When Santa Fe tutors Paola Villa and David Carl first contacted the campus Student Engagement Office in 2022 for permission to build an outdoor oven on campus, “the title of the email was Operation Prometheus,” Villa says. “We were asking to steal fire from the gods and give it to the students.” Their request was ultimately vetoed due to the high-desert climate. But from its ashes, the Prometheus Club—a group of students, faculty, and staff that hosts culinary-based events such as themed tastings, holiday feasts, and globally inspired fêtes—was born and continues to flourish.

Villa, the club’s faculty sponsor, joined St. John’s College Santa Fe amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerging from lockdown, she explains, the community needed encouragement to re-engage socially: “We wanted to build a communal oven on campus, like the ones that used to be in the center of towns in Europe,” says Villa, who was born and raised in Italy. “People would bring bread to bake, and along with bread, their stories.” Bread is a staple food across countless human civilizations, and the activity of making bread separates humans from animals—hence, Operation Prometheus, Villa adds, “was connected to our wider cultural project at the college.”

Santa Fe administrators acknowledged the value of Villa and Carl’s proposal. While understandably hesitant to install an outdoor oven in the drought-prone Sangre de Cristo mountains, they did green-light the purchase of five portable propane-powered ovens that year. Their acquisition enabled the nascent Prometheus Club to provide home-cooked Neapolitan pizzas to Graduate Institute students, Summer Classics participants, and high schoolers enrolled in Summer Academy.

The fiercely hot ovens can reach 900 degrees; pies molded from hand-tossed dough garnished with toppings are crisped in a mere 90 seconds, making it possible to feed a crowd with ease. As Villa had long hoped, students, alumni, staff, tutors, and friends of the college enjoyed bread and conversation in a communal setting that inspired new and renewed connections.

Now entering its fourth year of existence, the Prometheus Club has evolved and expanded beyond its initial mission of communal cooking. After its first president, Finn Huggs (SF25), moved on to a master’s program in Italy to study food policy, his successor, Alexander Burk (SF25), dove deep into the art and craft of Neapolitan pizza. The club’s third president, Touky Kim (SF26), brought a more philosophical approach to the role.

“We have a lot of art programs and practicums at St. John’s, but they’re focused on creation for individual intellectual practices,” says Kim, an international student from Korea who graduated this past May. “That’s not quite for sharing. But the whole concept of St. John’s is sharing your ideas and opinions. Prometheus Club allows the creation and the sharing of the creation. It’s an invitation. You get to share and consume rather than observe.”

With Kim at its helm, Prometheus Club hosted meals at local restaurants—from chain eateries to fine dining—and fostered seminar-style discussions about the nature of taste, flavor, and structure to develop a shared vocabulary around their sensory responses. Beyond dinner-table philosophy, club members, including Kim, began cultivating their own home gardens, approaching the growing of herbs and vegetables through the dual lens of science and tradition while comparing the merits of basil varieties and consulting their grandmothers on soil hydration and the proper time to plant garlic.

This summer, members of the Prometheus Club engaged in a multi-week series of experiments with liquid-nitrogen gelato—and, once again, they invited Summer Academy, Summer Classics, and Graduate Institute students to taste-test their creations. Inspiration for the project came courtesy of Villa, by way of Italian scholar Davide Cassi, whom she met during a recent visit to the University of Parma.

Cassi is a professor of physics of matter and the founder of the University of Parma’s Gastronomic Physics Laboratory and Future Cooking Lab. Food scholars through the Future Cooking Lab explore innovations while re-thinking and playing with “traditional” Italian cuisine. Gelato, for instance, is traditionally made with milk and slowly churned and frozen for many hours. Liquid nitrogen takes just 16 seconds, and the mixture can become creamy even without dairy. Can gelato be gelato if it doesn’t contain milk? Or is it enough to capture the taste of gelato?

Knowing that philosophical questions like these were perfect fodder for Johnnies, Villa went on to collaborate with Santa Fe’s seasonal Summer Classics and Summer Academy programs on courses that necessitated the purchase of liquid nitrogen dewars—storage containers for the famously cold, inert substance. Prometheus Club members were able to conveniently utilize those dewars while spending weeks experimenting with different combinations of fruit, chocolate, fat, and liquid nitrogen before hosting a formal practicum for Summer Academy students.

The sweet treat provided a respite from the summer heat while providing plenty of food for thought on the science of taste, the philosophy of perception, and more. The concept of “creaminess,” for example, as it relates to ice cream and gelato, “is when your tongue doesn’t feel any grains or icy structure,” Kim notes. “When regular gelato freezes, the crystals form a little bigger than 15 micrometers: the threshold for when your tongue feels the grain. If we fast-freeze it, the crystals have no time to expand past that size, so our tongue can’t feel any grains, and we call it creamy. It’s a definitional idea.”

Kim, who worked as a cook for a Korean-Italian fusion restaurant before coming to St. John’s, has always kept the idea of opening his own establishment in the back of his mind. Running Santa Fe’s Prometheus Club solidified his idea of the type of restaurant it would be—organic, farm-to-table, and based in science—while his campus mentor, Villa, helped him hone his leadership skills. “I learned how to set expectations but not be dictatorial,” he says. “Everyone here is a volunteer, and cooking for the campus is a lot of work.”

Going into the 2026–27 academic year, members of the Prometheus Club are slated to serve homemade gelato at St. John’s Santa Fe Johnnie Family & Friends Weekend on Saturday, October 3, thanks to their successful Summer Academy practicum. And at the club’s helm are three new presidents, all women: Shuyu Tian (SF27), Elizabeth Hopfensparger (SF29), and Savannah Skees (SF27). Just like with their predecessors, “our first women leaders will allow us to ask new questions,” Villa says. “It’s interesting to ask women about their relationship with food, with tradition, with nurturing and cooking for others.”