Approximately twice a week during Penn State’s fall and spring semesters, the hottest dinner reservation in town is not in a restaurant at all—at least not in the traditional sense.
The pop-up-style theme dinners of Café Laura, located in Mateer Building on the north end of campus, book up weeks in advance, drawing students, faculty and local community members looking to enjoy a unique fine dining experience while supporting Penn State students.
The students running the dinners are all seniors enrolled in Advanced Food Production and Service Management (HM 430), the lab-based, capstone course of the hospitality management degree program.
During the first week of class, students break up into management teams of six to eight people, and each team plans a dinner they will manage from concept through execution, explains George Ruth, associate teaching professor in charge of the class.
“Basically, they’re coming up with a business plan from A to Z: marketing, financials, schedules, job descriptions—pretty much everything you would do if you were going to open up a new restaurant,” he says.
One of the first things each team must decide is the theme that will drive everything from the menu to the decorations for their event. Recent themes have ranged from timely pop culture-related Barbie and Taylor Swift themes to more regionally focused themes such as those highlighting cuisine from New Orleans and South America.
As each team develops the menu around their theme, the class participates in a taste-testing event for every single menu item.
“It’s kind of a crazy night. That’s the first time they really start to see their theme come to life, through the food, which is really fun,” Ruth says.
Once the recipes are scaled and the planning is finished, each team has two opportunities to present their meal to the public, using the first dinner as a learning experience.
Katie Murphy was a member of the student team presenting “From France, With Love,” a French bistro-themed dinner held in November.
“What we took from our first dinner was a lot of just tweaking some recipes. We gave comment cards to our guests, so we got feedback like some things may have been a little too salty or overcooked, and we revised those for our second dinner,” she says. “We also changed some processes to make things more efficient.”
The a la carte menu for the evening included three appetizer choices: baked brie crostinis, blue crab beignets served with a spicy remoulade and French onion soup.
Entrees included “steak frites,” a strip steak served with au poivre sauce; crispy chicken cordon bleu; salmon almondine; and a hearty gluten-free ratatouille dish. All entrees included an arugula-based salad served with a tangy lemon Dijon vinaigrette dressing.
The dessert menu included chocolate crepes and an apple tart with salted caramel drizzle and bourbon whipped cream. A French 75 mocktail was also on the menu.
To give the café the feel of a French bistro, tables were set with napkins wrapped in the colors of the French flag, and decorations included Paris-themed posters and photographs, French wine bottles and corks and stacks of macarons.
The team running the meal took charge of the various management duties, while other class members worked as servers. In fact, the Café Laura dinners are 100 percent student-run, which sets the program apart from similar lab courses offered at other universities.
“A lot of them have full-time staff cooking and managing behind the scenes. I don’t think there are many places that do it with the students like we do it,” Ruth says.
He also stresses that these students are not culinary students.
“A lot of our customers don’t realize that the primary objective of this class is to learn how to be managers. Yes, we serve food, but that is not the primary focus. The primary focus is on developing their leadership style,” he explains. “That’s what the class is fundamentally about. It’s not about mashed potatoes or steak.”
As the students involved approach graduation, they say the leadership skills they learn in this class will serve them well.
Nico Johnson, who has accepted a position with Ritz-Carlton in Cleveland after graduation, says, “I think the biggest takeaway for me will be the teamwork. Working together to make something so huge, working with people you may not be super close with, going outside of your comfort zone—those will be the biggest things that will carry over to the real world.”
All Café Laura theme dinners are BYOB. Appetizers and desserts are priced at less than $10 each, while entrees can range from $18 to $32. The attentive service and the food quality are comparable to, if not better than, what you’d find in many of State College’s traditional fine dining establishments.
“We compete with a lot of the better restaurants in town as far as the customers who come to us,” Ruth says. “They’re very educated customers that have certain requirements. But they also understand that we’re a student mission as well.”
Spring dinner themes are listed at cafelaura.psu.edu/theme-dinners. Reservations are required. T&G
Karen Walker is a freelance writer in State College.
