Many students arrive for class thinking they don’t need to know about beverage because they deal with food. Here’s why they’re wrong.

By Albert W. A. Schmid, MA, CCP, CHE, CFBE, MCFE, CCE, CEC, COI

The message outlined in black letters on the white t-shirt is clear: Beer is Food! The first time I saw this t-shirt, I smiled, but beer does not hold a unique distinction among alcoholic beverages because wine and spirits are food, too.

In simple terms, beer is made from grain and wine is made from fruit. If a beer is distilled, it becomes either vodka or whiskey. If a wine is distilled it becomes a brandy (or sometimes vodka). There are other spirits that might be considered either depending on how you look at them, such as tequila from the agave plant, rum from sugar cane and vodka from potatoes. In any case, the alcohol starts with a food product, and we consume the final product as part of a meal or snack.

At The Culinary Institute of America, a final-semester project to plan and execute an event marketed to the public is one of the most rewarding parts of students’ educations.

By Dr. Pat Bottiglieri

Foodservice Management is taught in the final semester of the senior year in the Bachelor of Professional Studies Program at The Culinary Institute of America (CIA). Prior to taking this course, students will have successfully completed most of the required management and liberal-arts courses and all of their culinary, baking and pastry courses. Foodservice Management provides students with managerial concepts and theories for a senior level of management practice.

In addition, the course includes a capstone project. The project requires students to plan and execute an event that is marketed to the general public. The events must generate a profit. And, as the CIA is a not-for-profit college, any surplus is “reinvested”—divided between an external charity that students select and an internal scholarship fund. This part of the course is worth 25% of each student’s grade.

Dylan Lipe of Sweet Baby Ray’s Restaurants & Catering was born to barbecue.

By Brent T. Frei

Barbecue is “part of everyday life” for Dylan R. Lipe, corporate executive chef for Sweet Baby Ray’s Restaurants based in Wood Dale, Ill., with two units in greater Chicago, and True Cuisine & Sweet Baby Ray’s Catering, a full-service off-premise catering, event-planning and event-production company.

Hailing from southern Illinois, part of America’s rich barbecue region that includes Kansas City, Memphis and St. Louis, “As I’ve grown as a chef and culinarian, it doesn’t matter where I went, I would always seek out barbecue in some form or another,” Lipe says.

Sweet Baby Ray’s is eponymous with the No. 1 barbecue sauce in the nation. But the restaurants’ reputation transcends the sauce brand that was sold five years ago to a salad-dressing manufacturer. Licensed to open four restaurants under the Sweet Baby Ray’s name, the company still has room for and envisions expansion.

Because the culinary and foodservice industries are very small, helping students learn how to establish personal relationships with their peers becomes part of our jobs.

By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT

Last month, this column explained the importance of and ways to construct an elevator speech, one of the critical ways to explain oneself to others. This month, the topic is how to help students make connections to others. Some of them may be able to do so easily and find their extroverted personality a real asset. Others are not so comfortable reaching out to others and may be reluctant—for various reasons—to talk about themselves.

Students want to be assessed. It appeals to their emotions and egos. Find ways to assess them beyond merely awarding a letter grade.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

There is a Jimmy Buffet song called “Fruitcakes” that contains the line, “We all got ‘em, we all want ‘em. Now what do we do with them?” We might not want assessments, but we all got them, and the question becomes: “What do we do with them?” I submit that creative assessments can be used to inspire your students to levels they (and you) thought they could never reach.

Whether you teach in a rich suburb, an inner-city school, a nonprofit vocational center or the top culinary academies in the world, you will always have less-than-ideal students in your class. Because of physical, emotional or mental problems, because of upbringing, because of poverty or substance abuse, or because of a myriad other factors, you will have students who need extra motivation, who need extra inspiration. The purpose of this article is to show how assessments can be used to accomplish these two goals.