Capstone Cafe: The front and back

The Boyd Dining Room reception area. (original photo)

The class run like a restaurant

by Darian Bazile

The Capstone Cafe, an annual series of lunch and dinner services that run in March and April, gives UNLV's food and beverage hospitality students the chance to show their skills through a restaurant open to the public.

As the Capstone Cafe's name suggests, it acts as a capstone course for the hospitality major. The class tasks students to run their own restaurant services as a culmination of the various skills they learned. Lunch services typically run from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on the second floor of the Frank and Estella Beam Hall building. Dinner services are held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Stan Fulton Building on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The practicing students put out three-course meals for $10, providing a nice local place for students and faculty to eat.

"This class really gives students the opportunity to manage a restaurant," said Laura Book, instructor at UNLV's Harrah College. "It gives experience on how it's like to manage other people."

While food makes up a significant part of a restaurant experience, front end management helps shape that experience. Front end operations deal with the part of restaurants that customers see, from customer service to restaurant design. Patrons wishing to dine sits at a reception area - or at the bar if they are at least 21 - before being taken into the dining room proper. The student staff acts as quick as they can to address diners and to keep things running smoothly.

Each Capstone Cafe service has a theme, making restaurant design an important aspect. For example, the Retro Starlight Diner service went for a 1950s diner for its theme, resulting in the experience getting designed as a retro diner. The menu gets crafted to revolve the theme, with two choices for appetizers, entrees and desserts. The aesthetics of the restaurant must also go along with the theme, with decorations and appropriate music playing while diners eat.

The first lunch service, the Twisted Sun, ran on March 13. The service followed the theme of a beachside Californian restaurant, with projectors displaying beach scenes while a sound system played slow beach jams. Diners had an appropriate menu of light foods. One of the appetizers consisted of toasted sourdough bread with an avocado hummus. Then came one of the entrees: chicken caesar wraps paired with french fries. Dessert topped off the experience, one of them a cheesecake drizzled in and infused with acai berry sauce.

Twisted Sun's offerings (original photos)

Book teaches front end management to hospitality students. Book brought her management and restaurant experiences from working in her parents' restaurant growing up and being on the staff of the Aria and Cosmopolitan. She originally taught Human Resources Management in Spring of 2014, but she has since started teaching in the specific food & beverage hospitality field last semester. While she teaches students management, she plays a more hands-off role with the Capstone Cafe, acting as a facilitator for the night services. That said, "hands-off" does not mean "easy."

"It's not like a class where you can B.S. a paper, where you can throw something together 30 minutes before class or an hour before," said Christopher Lindsay, chef instructor. "You're making food and you're going to plate that food and you're going to garnish it and you're going to serve that food to the public."

Lindsay teaches and facilitates the food end of things with regards to the Capstone Cafe. Lindsay has a long history in the culinary field, starting as an apprentice in a Salt Lake City restaurant to working at Las Vegas restaurants, with a long series of accomplishments behind him. In 2008, the Clark County School District approached him to run East Career and Technical Academy's culinary program, which he did until 2011. He also taught at UNLV part-time before pursuing his master's in education and now teaches at UNLV full-time.

"The first six weeks are planning and training and we start service on the seventh week," Book said.

In that six week period, students made plans for the services, researching menu items to serve to the public. Students decided on the themes and focused on how to make the menu and aesthetics embody those themes. As service times approached, the class started ordering supplies or made them from scratch, like pizza dough and pickles. The costs of the supplies ends up getting covered by the profits from the services, with the expectation that the services make even.

At some point during that period, the students put out advertising. Students make up posters, usually posted at the Frank and Estella Beam Hall, Student Union and Lied Library. Students also set up websites using Weebly.

"Some go beyond and use social media like setting up Facebook events, doing more special things to grab people's attention," Book said.

Lindsay said that students need to do a better job advertising. However, he acknowledged that they should not overdo it on the advertising. Broad advertising would bring more attention to the Capstone Cafe, but, students need to avoid attracting too many people.

"If we do, the experience for our students gets tarnished," Lindsay said. "If we have too many, things go bad because they can't handle the pressure and the stress."

Services last for only a two hour period, so, having too many patrons becomes hard to handle for a learning experience. Lindsay said he prefers a sweet spot of 72 to 80 patrons while Book suggests 65 to 70.

Patrons of the Capstone Cafe get to fill out evaluation cards after eating. Behind the scenes, the students also evaluate each other in a peer-to-peer system. Managers evaluate each other, the managers evaluate the staff and vice-versa. The students constantly rotate roles between services to get a taste for the different positions.

Possible changes for the hospitality curriculum looms. However, it will not affect the Capstone Cafe. Rather, proposed curriculum changes aim toward complementing the capstone course. Lindsay said that there should be more undergraduate classes to better prepare students. He also aims to introduce more technology in courses to provide more resources for students to do research.

"I do believe that the Capstone Cafe is an important course for the curriculum and that it is here to stay," Book said.

The Capstone Cafe can only improve in the future, with the aim of having better prepared students ready to cook and serve.

Services will continue to run through April. It costs $10 for a full course meal, though, some services offer separate beverages to order for various prices.

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