Students bustling around with pots and pans, scampering to make sure their vegetables are steamed just right and checking to ensure that each detail of their class participation is noted by their instructors.

These are some of the things you might find if you were to observe the "living lab" of Café Laura, 101A Mateer Building. The student-run café is part of the educational partnership between Penn State Housing and Food Services and the School of Hospitality Management and is a part of the College of Health and Human Development. It provides hands-on educational experience for students in the hotel, restaurant and institutional management (HRIM) program while serving up great food at an exceptional price to customers.

"This semester, students are solely responsible for everything that happens at Café Laura," said Steve Musco, instructor for HRIM 330 (Food Production and Service Management).

"It's crazy at times, but we have been getting a lot of compliments that the food is good."

Musco, who graduated in 2001 as an adult learner from Penn State, is now in charge of the educational goals of the program for the HRIM 330 students.

Musco said the class is once a week for two credits.

"From 8 to 8:50 a.m., students have class, then they have 10 minutes to get organized, and from 9 to 10 a.m., they prepare all of the recipes for lunch," he said. "From 11 a.m. until 1:35 p.m., lunch is served, and from 1:35 to 2:15 p.m. they have to clean and sanitize everything."

The class is from 8 a.m. until 2:15 p.m., he added.

Musco said the goals of the program are to teach students the ins and outs of the restaurant business."Our goal is to put them in positions that require them to think on their feet. This gives them a venue to make decisions, good or bad," he said. "Once you leave here and make bad decisions your future hinges on it, but here we have room to fix it."

Chris Boyle (senior-hotel, restaurant institutional management) said some pre-requirement courses for HRIM 330 are a nutrition class and HRIM 329 (Introduction to Food Production and Service).

"You learn how to portion things and you have to pass the serve-safe test to be serve-safe certified," he said. "That teaches you how to cook certain things at the right temperature, how to clean things properly, etcetera."

Boyle said students involved in Café Laura as well as professors and customers that eat there have filled out surveys in the past to suggest things to better the restaurant. "No restaurant is perfect, so we're trying to figure out ways to fix flaws to make it more efficient," he said. "We're getting the best ideas from the surveys."

As for the food, Boyle said there is a soup and salad station, a deli meat station that also makes cheesesteaks and a home-style station that is in a six-day cycle for lunch. HRIM 430 (Advanced Food Production and Management) prepares and serves dinner.

"Today, there is baked ziti for $6 and chicken parmesan for $6.50 for lunch," he said.

Daily menus for breakfast, lunch and dinner can be found at www.cafelaura.psu.edu.

Scott King, the general manager of Café Laura, likes to challenge students and include them in his daily tasks. "We require the students to create a purchase order," he said. "The students are given a recipe packet with all the food items they will be preparing on their day as a kitchen manager."

King said the packet contains 15 to 20 recipes, and the students are required to purchase all ingredients needed to produce those recipes. They produce cost sheets for each item and develop a food cost for their menu.

"If the food cost is above our budgeted cost, they are required to produce a variance report explaining why their cost is above our budgeted," he said.

"Once the meal is over, the students are asked to provide us with a profit and loss statement and determine if the meal was a fiscal success or failure and explain why."

With the motto "learning is doing," King said the students who run Café Laura cover everything from themed dinners to large events for student organizations.

"It's pretty intense that you see students running the whole thing," he said.

King wishes the location of Café Laura wasn't in such a northern area of campus. "[Popularity] builds each semester, but we're kind of here in nowhere land. If we were on College Avenue it would be monstrous," he said, "but, we can't pick the location."

Emily Good (graduate-psychology) goes to Laura to eat often because it is near her classes. "I like the food," she said. "It's pretty good and it's cheaper than a lot of the stuff at Kern."

Musco said the best thing the HRIM students make at Laura is the pizza.

"It's the best pizza in town," he said.