A popular Louisiana-style restaurant goes from roadside stand to Cajun cuisine sensation.

True tastes of the bayou are surfacing throughout the South, and Cajun Steamer Bar & Grill is happy to take the blame.

For years, co-founder Jeff Thompson has been pouring his Cajun heart and soul into the growing chain of restaurants, but he admits that it all began from his own selfish interest.

When Thompson moved to Birmingham from Louisiana in the early 1990s, his first order of business was to assess the local dining scene. That’s when he discovered a glaring void that made it virtually impossible for him to call Alabama home.

“There was no Cajun food at all, and I just can’t live without my crawfish!” Thompson says, laughing through his thick Louisiana drawl. “It was either do something about it or go home. This was a deal-killer.”

Thompson took matters into his own hands, setting up a modest roadside stand and selling crawfish from the back of a trailer hooked up to his truck. It was anything but fancy, but his winning formula of fresh seafood sold at reasonable prices proved that the market was ready for authentic Cajun cuisine.

“It was pretty simple—just a couple of tables and some umbrellas—but you wouldn’t believe how excited people here got over it,” Thompson says. “It was as if I had introduced them to a whole new culture, like they’d never had crawfish before—not the fresh kind, anyway. That little stand still brings back fond memories for me; it still brings a smile to my face when I think about all the people I met. That’s when I could start calling Birmingham home.”

In this final of three installments focusing on employing an effective interaction strategy to increase loyalty and sales in your program’s student-run foodservice outlets, influencing four customer perceptions—“Fresh,” “Trust,” “Mystery” and “Ownership”—is key to success.

By Renee Zonka, RD, CEC, CHE, MBA

Last month, I wrote about how to teach the new “interaction economy” in the classroom and implement it in your program’s foodservice outlets while promoting the benefits of doing both. In this final segment of my three-part focus, I will touch on achieving desirable perceptions among foodservice customers—the successful eliciting of which can create value to the customer by enhancing his or her loyalty to your program’s operations and branding.

The concept of a new interaction economy replacing the “experience economy” was introduced in 2008 by InterAction Metrics, an Oregon-based company specializing in customer-experience optimization and customer-interaction management. Some of the following insights and advice come from the white paper published by that company, while most is the result of our experience in teaching the main tenets of the interaction economy in the School of Culinary Arts at Kendall College. Our goal is to arm students with the training and know-how to deliver unparalleled customer service so that they may excel in their foodservice careers.

Says this educator, ratios trump recipes in helping students learn. The first of a two-part series on teaching culinary arts through ratios in practical culinary labs.

By John Reiss, CEC, CCE

Are we training students the right way or the wrong way? That’s a loaded question, and one that culinary educators can easily become quite defensive about. The knock in culinary education often comes from professional chefs who say we aren’t training students to be seasoned and productive when they graduate.

Having taught in the industry for more than 25 years, I have often pondered and debated with peers over best practices for preparing students to be job-ready when they finish their studies. I have come to the conclusion that maybe there is a better pedagogical approach, one that involves the use of culinary ratios.

We often teach students practical competencies through the aid of recipes. Why? It’s true that recipes are important to some extent in the kitchen, but most professional kitchen work relies on intuitive cooking, standardized techniques and procedures and proper mise en place, rather than recipes.

Foodservice educators across North America earn recognition for their creativity in the culinary classroom.

The Idaho Potato Commission (IPC) recognized three educators in the 2014 CAFÉ-Idaho Potato Commission Innovation Awards at the 10th-annual Leadership Conference of the Center for the Advancement of Foodservice Education (CAFÉ) in Salt Lake City this summer.

“Our involvement in encouraging innovation and creativity among culinary instructors and students is very rewarding to us as well as the recipients,” says Don Odiorne, IPC’s vice president of foodservice. “After all, one of the goals of our Idaho potato growers is to reach the next generation of farmers, too, and equip them with the skills to continue to learn, progress and succeed in a changing world.”

Ten years’ worth of surveys, interviews and roundtable discussions reveal the evolution of trends in the education segments.

Courtesy of Y-Pulse (ypulse.org), a division of Olson Communications 

Ten years ago Y-Pulse (www.ypulse.org) began tracking foodservice trends through the nation’s leading foodservice directors in the education segments, as well as their young customers, to give food marketers insight on what would shape the tastes of tomorrow’s consumers. This latest report identifies how young consumers’ tastes are setting the pace for tomorrow’s menus.

In K-12 schools, lunch has become a learning lab empowering young consumers with the knowledge they need to make mindful nutritious choices. Today’s school foodservice directors are serving up a lot more than breakfast and lunch; 96% consider teaching nutrition education to be an important part of their job. On college and university campuses, foodservice directors are on the cutting edge of experimentation with new foods, new concepts and new delivery systems for some of the most demanding consumers in America.

The first part in a three-part series discussing tried-and-true and novel assessment ideas, as well as common methods whose usefulness in your program might be dated. Plus, how to customize and apply lesser-known, but effective, assessment strategies to fit your program.

By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT

Last month, we discussed maintaining a professional journal. This month as fall classes begin, we will talk about assessment since it is a critically important aspect of the work that we do. For the next two months, we will review various methods, and in two months, we will examine assessment criteria.

Purpose of Assessment
One of the gifts that we can give our students is to share our professional judgments of the quality of their work. Based on our best professional knowledge, the feedback that we can give our students helps them see their work more clearly, understand what they do well and learn what they need to improve. Providing those insights takes a commitment to be as objective and thorough as we can be in giving our students useful feedback.

Letter grades do not provide useful feedback. Comments in the margin of papers, corrected examination questions and detailed commentary on performance issues help students learn something. As faculty members, we need to think about which methods of assessment to use and which methods work best for which courses.

These very simple techniques are not taught more often in a 50-minute context because the blanched or parboiled product is generally not ready for service by the end of class. But, says Chef Weiner, they’re important to teach for their contributions to cooking. Here, he explains how to best teach the procedures, with applications that can fit perfectly into 50 minutes.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

Over the last four years I have written a number of articles on how to teach different cooking principles in a 50-minute-classroom setting. These articles have included:

• “Braising,”September 2010
• “Teaching Baking in 50 Minutes,”July/August 2011
• “Sauté,” January 2012
• “Teaching Steaming,” March 2013
• “Teaching Grilling,” April 2013

It is now time to address one of the easiest cooking principles to teach in 50 minutes: blanching and the related technique of parboiling.

By definition, blanching and parboiling are each just a quick process:

How adept are your faculty at integrating technology in the kitchen and classroom? Are you training and teaching them to understand issues relating to farming, processing, packaging and shipping of raw materials used in kitchens? Great teachers, like excellent employees in any field, thrive on self-improvement.

By Paul Sorgule, MS, AAC

Your facilities are in order, all of the collateral pieces are designed with wonderful pictures of incredible food and the smiling faces of your students, the website is up to date and your curriculum has been designed with input from accrediting agencies and industry leaders. You invested the time and energy seeking the best possible faculty.

So, everything is ready to go. Open the doors and let the students in. Is anything missing?

When institutions such as yours build their checklists for successful design and implementation of a culinary program, there is far too often one critical piece missing. Staff training and development, just as is the case in restaurant operations, falls victim to the deadly budget cut. Let’s think about this for a moment.

Administrators would likely agree that their most valuable asset is the cadre of great teachers they hire. These great teachers are dedicated to their chosen profession and excited to share their knowledge with students.

 The Idaho Potato Commission’s Cost & Size page ensures less waste, more cost-effective orders.

For students in cost-control classes, the Idaho Potato Commission (IPC) has added another essential foodservice tool to its online resources. The IPC cost and size calculators help take the guesswork out of purchasing Idaho^® Potatoes. From carton to plate, users can rely on these tools to give them real-time numbers for keeping food costs in line.  

To access the Idaho Potato Commission Cost & Size page, click on the toolbar link at https://idahopotato.com/foodservice/cost-and-size. The IPC has also made it easy to order a physical copy of the size guide and cost calculator.

Foodservice educators across North America earn recognition for their creativity in the culinary classroom.

The Idaho Potato Commission (IPC) recognized three educators in the 2014 CAFÉ-Idaho Potato Commission Innovation Awards at the 10th-annual Leadership Conference of the Center for the Advancement of Foodservice Education (CAFÉ) in Salt Lake City this summer.

Cary York, a culinary teacher at East Jessamine High School, Nicholasville, Ky., received the top award for the school’s Greenhouse and Food Preservation program, in which culinary, chemistry and science teachers and students collaborated to enable cross-teaching in multiple disciplines.

Culinary students planted seeds and seedlings to observe the growth of vegetables and herbs, which were used in the culinary and special-education food-preparation classes. They also took food production to a higher level by preserving their harvested products:  drying herbs, freezing peppers and tomatoes, and making salsa, pickles and jellies. Associated lesson plans included “The Gardener’s Chemistry: Measuring Soil pH”; “The Question of Additives”; and “Molecular Gastronomy.”