Redefining the Culinary Classroom

I got involved with the Café at Maryland Hall in the summer of 2017, when Dr. Maureen McMahon asked if I would be interested in managing the back end of this teaching café. I’m always seeking to educate myself and always seeking to challenge myself. Before becoming a culinary instructor at the Center of Applied Technology (CAT) South, I had 20 years of experience in the restaurant business, including several years when I owned my own restaurant, so I oversaw the process of getting the café ready. We had our final health inspection in May 2018 and opened to the public that month.

The biggest challenge—and what makes the café exciting—is having it work while still meeting the needs of the culinary students at CAT South. In 2018-2019 our culinary program was up for its second certification with the American Culinary Federation Education Foundation (ACFEF). We had a set menu and lists of tasks that need to be prepped every day for the café, but we also had to ensure that every student spent equal time working on each task to get the same experience and meet the hour requirements for ACFEF certification.

After a lot of trial and error and a redesigned curriculum, we adapted to the new normal by creating teams that rotated through the jobs needed to run a restaurant—general manager, line cook, housekeeping, and dish crew, to name a few. Together, these teams prepare and pack meals, maintain the kitchen, staff the café, and create inventories. We have team meetings each week and the students know that even if someone is absent, the same work needs to get done. We reflect and we reflect and we reflect and then we reflect again. Then we modify, modify, modify. It’s been a big job to get to get to this point, but at the end of the day it’s so rewarding because it’s about having more opportunities for the students.

You can talk and practice customer service skills, but it’s not the same as serving the public. Customer service is in every single industry, so every customer service skill these students learn here is a 21^st century skill that can carry on to anything that they do. We had students who wouldn’t talk to other students grow to be able to greet customers at the café. Building those skills sets these students up for opportunities they wouldn’t have been able to have before—it sets them up for a different life.

As we start a new school year, we have ideas to get students involved in the financial management of the café and there are long term dreams of installing a cooking station in the café, which would be game changing. It’s a work in progress, but the ACFEF shared that as far as they knew, we are the only high school program in the country managing an off-site café. For the time being it’s exciting to see so many of the students embracing their part in the café and it has given me the chance to grow myself to help give these opportunities to the students.