Atrium Café serves up quality food, hands-on learning opportunities
By Amy Nordrum, Staff Writer
May 8, 2007 | 6:09 p.m.
Spanish rice, corn fritters with fresh salsa, and chilled avocado soup.
This list may sound like something you’d read while walking down a calle (street) in Mexico, but these are all items that could be found at the Atrium Café in Grover Center on Friday. Students in an International Cuisine class planned the menu, titled "A Taste of Mexico," in honor of Cinco de Mayo. It’s one example of the unique learning opportunities available to students in this hands-on laboratory that doubles as a cafeteria.
The Atrium Café is an experiential kitchen and cafeteria where students majoring in Dietetics, Nutrition with Science, and Restaurant, Hotel, and Tourism (RHT) work to develop practical management and food service skills. Students in these majors are required to complete at least one 6-hour lab in the Café kitchen, where they plan meals and cook a variety of a la carte items to sell to faculty, students, and the public. A number of professors, graduate students, and staff members work in the Café, but it is the students who make the majority of the decisions about recipes, meals, and work schedules.
Diana Manchester, Associate Professor in Food, Nutrition, and Hospitality, directs the Café’s student learning experiences. She said students’ level of responsibility in the Café increases with their experience. Students start out learning basic cooking and food safety, how to use equipment, and how to efficiently manage their time. Eventually, they work their way up to senior capstone classes and are responsible for planning menus, choosing recipes, and assigning each task to a worker -- all the while taking cost limitations of the Café into consideration.
The managerial skills earned in more advanced classes may, in fact, be more important than basic cooking skills learned during students’ first years in the Café. The extensive planning that goes into organizing meals for a cafeteria, restaurant, or event can be just as challenging as making the food itself, Manchester said. “My No. 1 goal for students is to learn how to think critically and solve problems,” she said. In the Café, students develop these abilities by making scheduling decisions that maximize productivity and efficiency and by improvising when the right ingredients aren’t available.
Manchester adds that this year’s senior class is the first to complete a new curriculum that better integrates the Atrium Café into student learning experiences. She says the difference in student progress is noticeable, and that this year’s seniors exhibit a stronger sense of camaraderie and teamwork that she believes is a direct result of spending more time in the Café.
Ken McLean, who works with Manchester to manage the daily operation of the Café, said learning problem solving and also interpersonal skills are major benefits of working in the Café.
"You have six or eight people working in the back and there’s a lot of different personalities so you learn a lot about how you work with different people," McLean said. He added, "The students get to make mistakes (in the Café), and it’s an easy and safe environment to make mistakes because they’re not going to get fired."
Ashley Freed, a junior dietetics major, helps with food purchasing for the Café. "I take all the recipes and see what we need for the week," Freed said. Freed hopes to work as a hospital dietician, and said the lab she took last fall was good preparation because her job will require her to work closely with a hospital kitchen staff.
Freed also said many people don’t know what the Atrium Café actually is, and aren’t aware of the high quality of food it provides. Most customers are faculty and students from Grover and Walter Hall. "All the food is homemade," Freed said. "If we make vegetable soup, we chop all the vegetables up -- it’s not out of a can."
Lisa Mitchell, a sophomore exercise physiology major, spends a lot of time in Grover and said she eats breakfast at the Café about twice a week. "It’s good, and it’s convenient," Mitchell said. "The only drawback is they don’t take Dining Dollars or Bobcat Cash." The Atrium Café accepts cash and credit cards.
The Café also runs a catering business in conjunction with a new catering class, both of which equip students to accommodate a variety of customer needs. As Manchester described, catering a reception usually means simply providing an assortment of cheese, crackers, and vegetables, while doing a full-scale dinner, gives students more choices of what to make, but also more opportunity for problems.
"(In catering) some things are creative, some are standardized," Manchester said. The catering class and business focus on customer service and presentation aesthetics. "I think success in this business is getting the details right," Manchester said.
The Atrium Café was part of the Grover remodeling plan in 2001 that brought all six schools within the College of Health and Human Services into the same building. The Café was Dr. Annette Graham’s idea. She is the director of the Restaurant, Hotel, and Tourism program within the School of Human and Consumer Sciences. Manchester says the Atrium Café differs from similar operations at other colleges in that it’s more like a cafeteria instead of the more common restaurant style laboratory.