A year after after The TRAP closed, Chef Oya teaches the next generation of Indy chefs

Indianapolis Star

7 days ago

Oya Woodruff does things her way.
In 2016, with no culinary degree and minimal entrepreneurial experience but plenty of self-belief, "Chef Oya" opened The TRAP in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood, selling stomach-stuffing seafood trays in an area where local restaurants are few and far between. Many who frequented Woodruff's walk-up seafood counter were as acquainted with her larger-than-life charisma as they were with her signature garlicky 'TRAP buttah.'
Then, last summer, Woodruff closed The TRAP with little explanation. As longtime customers mourned the loss of a neighborhood staple, Woodruff moved on to a new chapter.
On a recent Thursday morning, Woodruff, now 41, stands surrounded by the familiar sizzle and sputter of meat in hot oil in a large kitchen. But she's not doing any of the cooking. The chefs in question are about a dozen students at Pike High School, where Woodruff recently concluded her first year as a culinary instructor.
From absolute kitchen basics to techniques that would be a reach for many competent home cooks, Woodruff's classes prepare students to provide for themselves and others with food. After doing precisely that for almost her whole life, Woodruff is now teaching the next generation.
'I think it's exactly what I need to be doing right now at this moment in my life,' she said.
Growing up in what Woodruff said was then one of Indianapolis' roughest neighborhoods near Post Road and 42nd Street ('Fo' Deuce,' as she knew it), the chef picked up her first culinary lessons from her grandmother and great-aunt, both professional cooks. By middle school, she regularly prepared meals for herself and her four brothers while their parents were at work.
In 2015, after unfinished stints at two colleges and nearly a decade working for various food vendors, Woodruff started selling food out of her house near 34th Street and Keystone Avenue. People arrived in droves to purchase Woodruff's seafood boil trays. The crowds attracted the attention of her next-door neighbors, who Woodruff said sold drugs out of their home, colloquially known as a trap house.
'They came over and was like, 'What you over here doing?'' Woodruff said. ''Cause at that point, I had more business than they had.'
Eventually, Woodruff's father urged her to find a commercial kitchen. In early 2016, Woodruff took over the storefront of a former Jamaican restaurant at 3355 N. Keystone Ave. and opened Chef Oya's The TRAP.
More than just a tongue-in-cheek name, The TRAP stood for 'Towards Restoring food Access for People.' While Woodruff took care to let no ingredient go to waste — 'I know exactly what to cook down to the egg, baby,' she said — she was also quick to offer free food to those in need.
Though The TRAP weathered the COVID-19 pandemic better than many eateries, it didn't escape unscathed. Inventory costs went up and kept climbing. Though there were still days when lines wrapped around The TRAP's lime-green corner, other days yielded single-digit customers.
'We were so busy for so many years, I guess I took for granted what it would look like if it fell of a little bit,' Woodruff said. 'And it fell off a little bit, and it scared me.'
Fearing she might be forced to close The TRAP, she began looking for a different path forward.
Woodruff, who now lives in Pike Township and has a daughter at nearby Lincoln Middle School, said for three straight years Pike staffers asked her to teach whenever Woodruff visited to guest-judge the culinary students' cooking competitions.
By the third year, Woodruff knew her days of running The TRAP full-time were numbered. In March 2024, at the urging of Pike staff including Principal Jeremy Wolley, Woodruff filled out an application. Before school began in the fall, she closed The Trap.
Pike's student body is very diverse, both in backgrounds and in interests, Wolley said. In Woodruff, he saw an industry veteran who could relate to kids and inspire them to chase their goals.
'I think she's a model for what can happen when you take a leap of faith and you chase your passions and you allow people to support you,' he said.
At 7:05 a.m. on Aug. 1, Woodruff kicked off her latest career arc. If her students had first-day jitters, hers were worse.
'I ain't never been afraid to be in front of people,' she said. 'But when I tell you the first time I walked in front of 25 16-year-olds that I knew were gonna have to see me every day… I was a ball of nerves for weeks.'
Woodruff's earliest classes dealt with fundamental skills like how to hold a knife and turn on a stove — as Woodruff puts it, 'the things you need to be in the kitchen and not kill anybody, or yourself.' Her students learn nutrition concepts in a traditional classroom, then put those lessons into practice in the hybrid kitchen-classroom lab next-door. Lab sessions have ranged from making popcorn to clarifying consommé.
Before any of her students so much as touched a cutting board, Woodruff asked each of them to complete a 'who are you?' assignment detailing their background and cultural identity. In her classroom, flags representing each student's heritage line the walls, from Mexico to Vietnam, the Caribbean to the Middle East. Pan-African and Black American Heritage ethnic flags pay homage to Pike's largely Black student body.
Pike is a majority-minority school, meaning it has more non-white than white students. Woodruff said it's important to her that students from a variety of backgrounds can see a path toward a future in the food industry. As a female chef of color, she hopes to serve as a living proof.
'Children need, so badly, to see examples of how they can make a living,' she said.
From behind her desk, Woodruff runs the classroom not unlike a professional kitchen. When she finishes an instruction or needs to get her pupils' attention, she calls out, 'One knife,' to which her students respond in unison, 'One cut.'
Still, Woodruff is hardly a drill sergeant. She jokes that she gets along with kids because she too is childish, prone to scatter-brained moments or the occasional curse word. To some students, Woodruff's teaching style is less militant and more maternal.
"She feels like a mom to us," rising senior Aaliyah Grubbs said.
Grubbs and a few of her classmates compared their dynamic with Woodruff — "Chef O," to them — to their relationships with their own mothers.
"If I had a dollar for every time she said something my mom had said, word for word, I think I'd have like $250 by now," rising junior Justyce Toler said.
Patient with her pupils but equally willing to let them know when they're getting on her nerves, Woodruff has created an environment where students are not afraid to ask questions or make mistakes. Though not all of her students plan to pursue careers in culinary arts, those who do appreciate Woodruff's (mostly) no-nonsense preview of what to expect.
"She shows us tough love to show us what it's gonna be like in the real world, in case we decided to join (the food industry) as a career," Grubbs said. "There might be a head chef or somebody yelling at you, not because they want you to do bad but because they're trying to instruct you. You need to be able to tolerate it and not always be in your feelings.'
For students who don't necessarily want to work in kitchens, Woodruff's classes offer lessons in patience and preparation. As Woodruff said, "everybody gotta eat."
While food is, by necessity, part of everyone's life, Woodruff has recently reshaped her relationship with it substantially.
Woodruff is the first to point out that she has always been a larger person. She said she grew up fat but competed in softball in middle school and then in golf at Broad Ripple High School, earning a scholarship offer from Grambling State University in Louisiana (though she opted to stay in-state for college).
Then, in 2020, she hurt her knee. Shortly after she was diagnosed with osteoarthritis. For the first time in her life, Woodruff felt her weight was holding her back from doing what she wanted, as chronic pain plagued her every step. She tried unsuccessfully to lose weight through dieting and exercise but in May of last year underwent bariatric surgery to relieve the burden on her knee.
Woodruff, who weighed 420 pounds at her heaviest and about 385 the day of her surgery, said she never had heart disease, diabetes or other illnesses people tend to associate with obesity.
Eleven months after her surgery, she weighed about 235 pounds, a little more than half the size of her peak weight. The decision to undergo surgery wasn't born out of shame, Woodruff said. Very few things in her life are. She's never bought into the stereotype that fat people are lazy or somehow inferior to thinner people.
'There's so many things that the world tells fat folks,' she said. 'And I've never held onto any of that. 'Cause I am who I am.'
While Woodruff's feelings about her body haven't much changed, her body has made her change the way she feels about food. Bariatric surgery effectively shrinks one's stomach, triggering weight loss by limiting the amount one can eat. For someone like Woodruff whose life has largely centered around food, that brought a reckoning.
'I fall to food in so many ways,' Woodruff said. 'It's how I communicate to people, it's how I tell people I love them. It's how I tell other people about who I am as a person. I eat food, but I live food.'
And now, she teaches it. As Woodruff continues to sort out her 'complicated' relationship with food, she tries to help her students better understand it so they can at, the very least, nourish themselves. Though she occasionally still serves chowder or other seafood out of The TRAP on a pop-up basis, her focus lies in her classroom.
'Being a teenager in 2025 must be the toughest thing ever, dealing with the world and everything,' she said. 'I just try to give them as much love and support as I am able to. And it's a different kind of love and support than they're gonna get anywhere else.'