It’s hard to believe I’ve already made it to my senior year. And now with my capstone done, May 7 seems to be creeping up faster and faster. But I digress ….
Students in the culinary arts and service management program put on a dinner for their capstone projects, including all the necessary planning and effort that comes with it. In previous semesters, these dinners focused on a single ingredient, such as tea or salt, which students researched and incorporated into every aspect of their meal. This time, we drew the names of famous chefs out of a hat. Many of us, however, hadn’t heard of the chefs we had drawn, including me, who got Chef Anne-Sophie Pic. Students rotated between positions, such as line cook, dishwasher and server, in the weeks before and after their dinners. And I had the honor to go first.
Unlike the old capstones, which required students to research one ingredient, the new version required us to get in the chefs’ heads and pick through every interview and article we could find. The assignment We looked back and analyzed how their experiences have influenced the way they look at food. The inspiration for some of their dishes was easy to figure out; Chef Pic’s French heritage led to a heavy French influence in her cooking, for example. Others required a little more digging, though: She occasionally uses Asian ingredients, which stem from a semester she spent studying abroad in Japan. She also uses caviar and sea bass together as an homage to her father, Jacques Pic, who was also a renowned chef that taught her to cook.
When it came time to start planning the menu, we were able to use a combination of our chef’s recipes, if they had published a cookbook, and our own recipes based on our interpretation of the chef’s style. My dinner mostly used Chef Pic’s recipes. But her cookbooks usually feature recipes for single items, so pairing different recipes together to form a coherent dish was a challenge. Later, we had to calculate the costs of each recipe to determine whether we stayed within our budget. After finalizing the menu and recipes, we had to submit a purchase order with every ingredient about a week before our scheduled dinner. In some instances, we has to use products that weren’t available through our normal vendors. I had to go to Nori’s to find matcha, a style of green tea, and many other students, whose chefs focused on farm-to-table, opted to buy their produce at the farmers market.
The week of the dinner, we worked extra hours, outside of our regularly scheduled class time, in order to ensure that our product came in. We wrote prep schedules to ensure we would be ready. My turnips and sole didn’t come in in time, though, so I had to be put off that prep until later in the week. I noticed that the students who took the time to fully flesh out their production schedules had a much more efficient, coherent flow. Those who didn’t struggled all week. While my planning in the kitchen was fairly thorough, I neglected to coordinate with my dining room manager, and we discovered that there were issues filling the seats.
But on the night of the dinner, the planning paid off. As each course went out, it felt like another weight had been taken of my shoulders. There were still unforeseen difficulties that I overlooked; the main entrée consisted of a fillet of sole, which had gone cold by the time I plated all 28 dishes. But at the end of the dinner, the guests’ overall reaction was positive. At the end of the day, we’re in this industry to serve the guests, so it’s their opinions that matter most.
In short, the capstone’s not about being a cook. After four years of culinary labs here, you’re expected to be a good cook. It’s about knowing how to plan, budget, manage people and resources, and lead. It’s about turning your experiences, even those not related to food, into a unique element.
It’s about being a chef.