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News

Cultural experience on menu at Barron's

by MOHAMMED OLOKODE
The Daily Cougar

Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel & Restaurant Management students begin the second week of the International Dinner series today at Barron's Restaurant in the Hilton Hotel.

This week's featured cuisine is Greek. Dinner is served from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday. The three course meals range from $8 to $18.

HRM students with an emphasis in food service are required to participate in the series. 

Each week in a semester, students create cuisines from different regions. It is also the responsilbity of the students to serve the food to the guests.

Kathy Patnaude, a lecturer at the college, has participated in the dinner series since 1998.

"I believe the main reason for hosting the dinner series is to give the students a real life experience running a restaurant," Patnaude said. 

The series also gives students an opportunity to understand more about the world, Patnaude said.

"They used to have a different theme for every single night. And when I changed it in 1999 to the whole week … I sort of broadened the theme so that the students will be able to find recipes more easily," she said.

Students use the Hilton College library to research professional cookbooks and find what interests them. 

"We have a four-week planning (schedule), and so they decide their menus ahead of time," Patnaude said. "Sometimes that's unrealistic, and it may take them three or two weeks to do it."

HRM senior David Tran said learning about the countries represented in the dinner series helped him create the menu.

"At the beginning of the actual process, we research the country," Tran said. "It gives the student a little more of a cultural perspective of everything." 

Patnaude said that although the student turnout is sometimes low, some students living on campus do attend the series.

"When I took the class myself in 1996, we had Japanese night, and we have a lot of the dorm students from Japan that came and ate," Patnaude said.

To increase attendance, students posted flyers around campus.

"The only problem is most international students do not know about it. Only the international students who know about it are the ones that go to this college," Tran said.

Patnaude said the real accomplishment is seeing that her students learn about the restaurant industry.

"When they come back and see me after they've been in the industry and tell me that they learned a lot from me, that's the most important thing."
 

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