Steve Musco sat where he could see everybody.
Maroon-shirted students in Musco's HRIM 430 class bustled back and forth in Café Laura, spreading tablecloths, setting places -- two forks, a knife, a spoon (all one inch from the edge of the table) -- preparing for service proficiency testing, which will gauge whether the students know the service procedures they've learned.
Musco reminded the students what they would be practicing that day -- beverage service (with water and wine) and serving and clearing plates.
"And if you break anything, we'll stay 10 extra minutes for each thing broken," he said.
After setting the tables, two students served water and then displayed the "wine," with water standing in for the vino.
All this was preparation for the real thing -- or at least as close to the real thing as possible. Thursday, Oct. 2 was a practice run to help for the 16 different actual themed dinners HRIM 430 (Advanced Food Production and Service Management) students began serving on Monday. These dinners will continue Monday through Friday of each week, ending on Dec. 11. Each of the 16 dinners will be served twice.
As for the practice run, the students had another audience besides Musco. Alumni of the HRIM program were back for an "Alumni in the Classroom" program. Earlier in the week, alumni led classes, but for this particular class, they critiqued students and fielded questions.
Chris Schreiber, Class of 1998, talked menus with students from the "Sensible Indulgence: Rediscover Your Senses" dinner.
Schreiber, who works as a corporate chef at IKEA, pointed out aperitif, the name the group had given to its appetizer section, is the French word for a small alcoholic drink served before a meal. Patrons might be expecting drinks, not the appetizers the group had planned, he said.
Schreiber's experience was apparent in an exchange concerning one of the group's dishes: moist organic chicken poached in orange spiced tea.
"If there's color in the entrée," he said, referring to the dish's name, "make sure color is involved in the plate. If people are ordering something orange, they expect they're seeing something orange."
He suggested an orange peel or sweet potato.
"You can take a sweet potato peel and turn it into a rose petal," he said.
The difficulty of this idea hung in the air until Laura Weyrick (senior-HRIM) responded.
"You can take a sweet potato skin and turn it into a rose petal," she joked, causing everyone at the table to laugh.
One table over, Lindsay Cray, Class of 2006, was giving advice while Phinezee Stokes (senior-HRIM) folded tablecloths. Stokes stopped folding to explain the dinner his group planned.
Stokes will act as assistant general manager during his team's first meal and general manager for his team's second. He's also named himself captain, though his teammates insist it's an honorary title. His group's theme dinner is called "La Fusion Del Sol," a name that reflects the menu's incorporation of both Latin and South American dishes. For example, one of the group's appetizers is ceviche, a seafood dish popular in both regions.
After discussing the menu, Stokes fetched his group's planning book, a 200-plus page document detailing everything from team goals to a financial plan to guidelines for how the front and back of the house should run.
This kind of planning is what separates HRIM 430 from the kind of jobs students get in local restaurants, Musco said.
"We hope students get all the tools and information they need not only to get a job, but to survive in the restaurant industry. We hope in five or six years they are general managers of their properties and successful," he said.
