Thursday, November 8, 2007 12:10 AM CST
Pantera restaurant gives students a taste of real life
By AMBER WILLIAMS, Staff Writer
awilliams@jg-tc.com
CHARLESTON — In black slacks and white shirts, the servers start filling the butter dishes and setting out the silverware.
Other workers sit at a table folding cloth napkins into perfect triangles for each place setting.
In the kitchen, a group of bush cooks are chopping vegetables and measuring the olive oil for some Greek dishes.
With only two hours left until the dinner rush, everyone is in motion.
However, this is not a typical day at a typical restaurant. It is a Tuesday afternoon at the Pantera restaurant, Eastern’s completely student-run restaurant set on the first floor of Klehm Hall on Eastern’s campus that serves the Eastern community once a week.
This is the first year the Pantera restaurant has been in business, as it began with the creation of the Family and Consumer Sciences Commercial Quantity Food Production class, which provides a hands-on environment for students to put into action what they have learned, said instructor Kathy Rhodes.
“We are just trying to expose them and give them the best education they can get,” Rhodes said.
In order to make the restaurant work, each student has to take on different responsibilities of running a restaurant, said Julie Gibson, senior hospitality major. At the beginning of the semester, the students are divided into groups that will rotate each week being either managers, servers or cooks.
The managers are responsible for deciding on a decoration theme for the week and overseeing activities in the restaurant that day.
Although Rhodes will decide on the food theme for the week, such as Italian or Greek, it is up to the class to decide which dishes they will make, said Laura Schenke, senior hospitality major. Since the students usually get started working at the restaurant only a few hours before the first serving, they have to choose recipes that will not take all day to prepare, she said.
When designing the menus, the students cannot use nuts because of the number of people with nut allergies and try to be conscious of the vegetarian community on campus, Rhodes said. The meals must also be balanced with dietary guidelines of carbohydrates, proteins and vegetables.
When the food gets to the restaurant’s clients, it also has to look as good as it tastes, Rhodes said.
The atmosphere at the restaurant is always professional, with managers dressing in professional attire, and the food is really good, Gibson said.
“We almost shock ourselves,” Schenke said of how good the food turns out.
Not everyone on campus knows the Pantera restaurant exists, and much of the advertising for the restaurant is through word of mouth, Gibson said.
The commercial quantity food production class is the only class at Eastern Gibson said she had taken that was completely hands-on. While the students are running the restaurant, Rhodes is not standing over their shoulders, Gibson said.
Rhodes said she likes to stay in the background while still paying attention to everything that is going on in the kitchen, especially if a situation comes up where a recipe is not turning out correctly and the class is running out of time. As the semester goes on, the students are more and more independent and need Rhodes’ oversight less.
“They have evolved amazingly over the semester,” Rhodes said.
Students are required to take photos of what they create each week so that they will have a portfolio to bring with them on job interviews. It gives potential employers a sense of what the students can accomplish and how they can overcome obstacles. From the first group of students who took the class, Rhodes said she knows of four who had already been hired to run their own restaurants.
Right now, the students are preparing the restaurant’s food in the former home economics classroom and do not have any commercial-size kitchen facilities, Rhodes said. The class is raising money and accepting donations to furnish a commercial-size kitchen in the future.
“We don’t have commercial facilities here, when we do, what we can teach them is amazing,” Rhodes said.
The Pantera restaurant is open on Tuesdays during the school year and reservations need to be made in advance through Rhodes, as the meals will sometimes sell out. With Thanksgiving break and finals on the horizon, next week will be Pantera’s last week open for the fall semester.
Pantera is only open to students, staff and faculty of Eastern at this time. Meals are $9.50 each.
Contact Amber Williams at awilliams@jg-tc.com or 238-6858.
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