WACO, Texas — TSTC's Culinary Arts student-run restaurant has officially opened its doors for the 2024 semester. Every Wednesday and Friday through April 12, you can dine to unique culinary cuisine as these students gain real world experience.
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TSTC Culinary Arts student Tiffany Kent is ready for what’s to come with this semester’s restaurant opening
“I’m essentially going to be talking with them, interacting with them, taking their orders making sure that essentially get exactly what they need,” Kent said.
The Culinary Arts program is opening its restaurant for lunch every Wednesday and Friday until April 12, except during spring break.
Students get hands-on experience of what it’s like working in a real-life culinary environment.
“I have a Maitre-d, which is a manager, so one student has been assigned that task, then I will have a host, and of course I have eight servers on the floor, two bussers, I have two students that are in the dish pit, two students that are working in the back preparing the beverages, and then of course I have several students that are back servers to the front servers,” said Head Culinary Instructor Martha Rivera.
As part of the front of house staff this week, Tiffany’s looking forward to having interactions with customers.
She thinks it will help with her people stills, with dreams of owning her own bakery business in the future.
“It’ll help me learn to interact with customers and essentially help me to learn what I need to do and how I need to present myself and how I need to communicate with them,” Kent said.
Isabel Galindo, who is cooking this week, has her heart set on pastries.
But since being part of this class, it’s opening her eyes to different culinary avenues.
“I was more of a baker when I came here, so now I’m more into the cooking, which is pretty awesome — it opened more of my horizons, I don’t know which one I want to do cooking, baking," Galindo said.
"I think I want to do like both fields, go out there, cook for a couple of years, then do baking, but my goal is to open up my own bakery or food truck bakery, so, one of the two."
No matter what avenue these students take, the lessons taught in this class are invaluable to whisk them into the future.
“They need to know everything, this morning I told them if this is something they decide to do, to run their own restaurant or own their own restaurant, these are the standards I want them to set,” Rivera said.
