The Quantity Food Production class at Ball State might seem to be a class all about food, but with the Allegre Restaurant assignment, knowing about food barely scratches the surface.
During the second week of school, Paul Martin and Dana Watkins, senior hospitality and food management majors, were given the task to schedule a lunch menu and chose a day to serve the items in their menus in the semester.
For Martin and Watkins, the project started when they turned around during their Quantity Food Production class and figured they'd make the perfect team.
Watkins suggested German food, which fit into the European cuisine theme for the semester, because of her German heritage on her father's side of the family and all the inspiring food she found at a festival she attended during the summer.
"I agreed because I like my protein," Martin said.
Next, they had to finish the menu, a market plan, create profit and loss statements, do a nutrition analysis, purchase orders and complete every other little detail that goes into running a restaurant. All of the paperwork and fine details were stored in Watkin's binder to keep them organized.
"Twenty-five percent of it is cooking, and the rest is politics," Martin said.
For Watkins, as the back of the house manager, this meant mapping out 17 pages worth of details for every recipe, down to plate design, portion size and ingredients. She also scheduled all 10 of her assistant's time on a task list so that everything was ensured to get done. When the restaurant opens, Watkins will be the chef for the meals.
Martin, as the front of the house manager, has been dealing with all of the costs, finding the most efficient dining room set up, choosing the linens and place settings, figuring out how to manage his four servers, and calling to confirm all 44 of their reservations.
If everything works out correctly, they relate the night to how a movie is run. Martin compares himself an actor and Watkins considers herself the producer.
After weeks of meetings and 3 hours of daily preparation outside of classes, the true test will be Wednesday.
For the next eight weeks, Allegre Restaurant will be run by a different pair of students ever week.
Because Martin and Watkins chose to go first, they had the least amount of time to prepare. But, their hard work has already started to pay off though, with their reservations filling up within an hour of opening.
"It's like signing up for classes," Martin said. "You have to be there as soon as the website opens."
All reservations for the semester have been filled.
After two years as the executive sous chef at the Country Club of Indianapolis, this is Matthew Chappell's first year as the instructor and he has strived to continue Allegre Restaurant as a hands-on, immersive experience for students.
"They really get students, not just learning through lectures," the Family and Consumer Sciences instructor said. "It gets students enthusiastic about learning again. When they go out into the industry, they will have something to fall back on."
Throughout this experience, both Martin and Watkins have been able to tailor their jobs to what they want to do in the future.
Martin doesn't necessarily want to work with food. Instead he wants to go into human resources at a hotel and branch off from there.
For Watkins, this project showed her just how much work she will have to put in later in life.
"I've never had a good look at how much detail goes into it," Watkins said. "I am totally okay with the no-sleep-work-all-the-time thing. Someday I want to own and operate my own bakery café."
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