He grew up in foster care. Now, as a fine dining chef, he’s working to help kids in the system.

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Chef Chris Piro intimately understands the realities behind the wild statistics about foster care because he grew up in the system.

High school dropout rates are three times higher for foster youth than for other low-income children. More than 40 percent of school-aged children in foster care have education difficulties. Less than 6 percent will ever earn a two-year degree. Less than 4 percent will obtain a four-year degree.

By age 17, more than half of youth in foster care experience an arrest, conviction, or overnight stay in a correctional facility.

“There’s a lot of ways life can go wrong. There’s lots of opportunities for mistakes to be made, and I was no angel growing up,” said Piro, a California native who is now a food and beverage director for a New Hampshire company. “But cooking was always honest and truthful, and pure.”

Today, Piro runs his newly founded The Again. Foundation, which he says will provide scholarships for kids in local foster care systems to help access an education — whether it’s to help pay for tuition or books, or to put extra money in their pocket “so they don’t have to work five jobs to survive while trying to study.”

“For a lot of people who are in the situation I was in, there’s no safety net. We couldn’t just go to mom and dad for money,” said Piro, a self-taught chef who served in the Air Force and studied politics.

Prior to moving to the Seacoast, Piro staged under renowned chefs in celebrated kitchens across the country, including Boka in Chicago, Koks in the Faroe Islands, and Kadeau in Denmark. To help raise awareness for the Foundation, he’s relaunched Again., a fine dining pop-up restaurant in Portsmouth that he’s previously hosted in Chicago, New York, and Atlanta, among other places.

Again. is self-funded, and 100 percent of the proceeds from the pop-up ticket sales go directly toward the Foundation. Dinners run once a month, and tickets cost $250 each, which includes a nine-course tasting menu with non-alcoholic beverage pairings (alcoholic beverages are available for purchase separately). These dinners are intimate, with just eight people seated at each event.

While Piro hosted these pop-ups in private event spaces in other cities, he’ll be hosting dinners in August, September, and October at chef Evan Hennessey’s The Living Room in Dover, N.H. Hennessey also owns Stages, a fine dining restaurant in a historic mill in Dover, and has competed and won on Food Network’s reality cooking show “Chopped” three times.

The menu changes based on seasonal availability, and Piro usually finds himself hiking around the woods of New Hampshire and southern Maine to forage for items like wild roses and cherry blossoms. He processes them, pickles them, and puts them on koji to make an amazake, a traditional sweet Japanese drink. Piro’s plating is typically whimsical, with plenty of edible flowers. Think: layering peach-colored rambling rose petals in a lobster dish.

His apricot, Bahama tomato, walnut and rose dish “represents exactly who I am,” said Piro. Like many of the dishes on the menu, this one pays homage to his late grandmother, who ultimately raised him after he left foster care. Apricots, he said, were her favorite fruit. Now, he takes apricot pieces and gently poaches them in a seasoned sugar, like a sweet adashi, and then he covers them in a Bahama tomato pulp, blackened celery roots (which takes 30 days to make), and walnut XO sauce. Candied rose and magnolia flower petals are cut and draped over each apricot piece to create a colorful mosaic.

“Each apricot piece looks like a flower itself,” he said.

Other dishes include a carrot tart, which begins the tasting, and a bee pollen custard to close it out. At each dinner, he plates the dishes along with three or so other people. The entire dinner is about 2.5 hours long. Four of the courses include the non-alcoholic juice pairings.

“You always have so much leftover product and there’s so much you can use it for,” said Piro. “I love the opportunity for ingredients to be highlighted, and showcase the same ingredient in multiple ways.”

For example, at an upcoming dinner in New Hampshire, he’ll be preparing a non-alcoholic rum using peels of fruit, walnuts, cinnamon sticks, and vanilla pods, which are usually thrown away.

While cities like Providence and Portland are known throughout New England for their food cities, fine dining establishments are harder to come by in New Hampshire. Breaking through is a challenge Piro is committed to for the sake of culinary creativity, and for his Foundation. He’s hoping to soon connect with local culinary programs at community colleges, and institutions like Johnson & Wales University in Providence, to help support students.

“New York, Chicago, Atlanta – all great food cities. But I love the idea of doing this in New Hampshire because there’s an opportunity to connect with people on a deeper level,” said Piro. For him, the way to do that is through food: “I found my voice, and my success, through food.”

Alexa Gagosz can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @alexagagosz and on Instagram @AlexaGagosz.