Art & Life

Culinary Arts cooks up competition in The Café 

Culinary arts, Kirkwood
Connor Echternacht, Christian Snyder, Lee DeLoach, Gunner Short, all culinary arts, prepare food in The Café as part of the Culinary Arts Takeover on Oct. 24, 2024. Photo by Gibson Lowenberg.

The Culinary Arts program took over The Café at Kirkwood Community College, serving three-course meals for $14 from Oct. 22-24, and featured a menu based on the fall season. 

This is the third “dry run” where Jeremy Ralph, professor of hospitality, and Michael Barshis, associate professor of hospitality, have hand-selected students from the Culinary Arts program to take over The Café, according to Ralph. 

“A lot of culinary programs across the state will have a restaurant option for their students, and we don’t have that option right now,” he said. 

Ralph added that they used to have students help prepare food at The Hotel but felt the experience was underwhelming. “What ended up happening is students would come in and chop mushrooms for an hour and a half or some menial tasks and weren’t really getting an experience,” he said. 

Giving students real experience in a kitchen was the primary goal for both Ralph and Barshis. 

Part of this experience is the opportunity to craft a menu from scratch according to Ralph.  

Once students are selected to participate in the takeover, they come together to pitch ideas on themes and reach a consensus on what they would like to do. 

Then, with the guidance of Ralph and Barshis, a menu is created by researching different recipes and experimenting with what is menu-worthy and what isn’t. 

This class gives students a real opportunity to work in a kitchen setting. “It gives them the experience of making it faster and high-volume cooking and production prep,” said Barshis. 

“Those are really important skills for them to take out of our program and this was something we’ve been looking for, for a while as a way to get them involved in actual live cooking. 

Right now, they are only doing one event per semester but Barshis said the goal is to have two events a semester lasting two weeks at a time. Particularly since they have been successful every time they’ve been in Iowa Hall

Currently, the course will be renamed in the 2025 fall semester to Applied Culinary Skills according to Barshis. 

Image courtesy of Gibson Lowenberg | Kirkwood Communiqué