Junior Andrew Ballesteros is one of many students who notices the aromas that waft from the culinary room every Tuesday and Wednesday.  “They usually have a nice smell of good food,” Ballesteros said.  Students and staff at the high school will soon be able to taste these aromas with the help of Jennifer Smith’s culinary classes’ new lunch service.

“Culinary 3 is based on the (food) industry,” Smith said. “Their main job is to serve people and of course serve food. So the students have to create a resturaunt.”

Smith’s Culinary 3 students will begin serving lunch in the culinary room to senior students and staff every Thursday during all lunch periods.  The meals will cost $5 and include one entree, one or two sides, a dessert and a drink.  Their restaurant opened to staff only April 9, but after opened to both students and staff the following Thursday.

This year, Smith opened the floor for her students to create their own business plans for the restaurant, as opposed to previous years when she led the students through the process. “What kind of restaurant they wanted to make was totally up to them,” she said.  The students spent time coming up with plans in groups for the restaurant.  “They had to make business plans and then present those plans to the ‘interested investors,’ which were (Superintendent) Dr. (Corey) Lunn and (Principal) Mr. (Brent) Riessen,” Smith said. “Then those two had to decide who won.”

Once a plan was chosen, the students began strategizing on how to run a restaurant in the middle of a high school. Smith said she delegated teams for the students to organize the serving.  “We’re setting it up where we have one menu, you pay at the door, we’ll have a counter set up and you can either eat here or go elsewhere,” Smith said.

The students in the class have also been working their weekly menu and making decisions on what to serve the students and staff. “The idea is to have people experience different [types] of food,” junior Olivia Baldner said. “And each week it changes, like [one] week we are doing Arabian food.”  It takes the class multiple days and class periods to plan for each serving day.  “We plan for a week,” Baldner said, “We cook Tuesdays and Wednesdays, serve Thursdays and then clean up and prepare for the next week on Friday.”

Since the students in the class are entirely in charge of preparing and serving the meals, they have to use the skills they have learned in the class thus far.  “The meals are fun to make, but they take a while and are [challenging],” sophomore Sophia Nelson said. Nelson said that Culinary 3 is quite different than the other culinary classes because of the main focus. “Culinary 3 is more about learn how to run a restaurant, (rather than cooking),” Nelson said.