New facility cooks up culinary lessons

LAKEWOOD RANCH — Garry Colpitts looks around a spotless kitchen, enjoying the last few moments before culinary chaos ensues.

With the last quiz paper in hand, Colpitts wastes no time.

“You’ll be making cream of broccoli; and you guys, you’ll take on tomato basil soup,” Colpitts instructed students in his Wednesday afternoon Introduction to Food Production Management class last week.

As the students of the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee gathered the ingredients listed on their recipe cards, Colpitts stood back with his arms crossed next to visiting Turkish professor Burak Mil and watched the process unfold.

Beginning Jan. 7, Mondays through Wednesdays, similar scenarios of apron grabbing, group work and evaluations on best practices in the kitchen fill the school’s College of Hospitality and Technology Leadership’s newest addition to its program — the Culinary Innovation Lab on Lakewood Ranch Main Street.

The Viking Culinary Center formerly occupied the space.

Culinary students, USF faculty members and Lakewood Ranch community members celebrated the grand opening of the new cooking school during a ribbon cutting ceremony Feb. 5.

For the last two years, the university shared the kitchen area of Manatee Technical Institutes’ State Road 70 campus, which created an at-times chaotic environment, Colpitts said.

Now that the Culinary Innovation Lab has its own space, instructors look toward the future and discuss hosting cooking classes for patrons in the future, as well as events catered by the students, who cook and serve their food in the same building.

“The word ‘priceless’ comes to mind,” Colpitts said of having the lab. “This is huge for the school.”

Currently, the space, consisting of a bar and kitchen, a formal dining area and a dishwashing station, serves as the hub for students to receive a hands-on experience of working in a kitchen each week.

“We’re bringing the kitchen into the classroom, and the classroom into the kitchen, I guess you could say,” Colpitts said. “We’re not teaching them to cook with PowerPoint presentations; we make the experience real. They’re taking off their blazers and swapping them for chefs’ coats.”

Three instructors — Colpitts, Mil and Joe Askren — each lead classes targeting different aspects of the hospitality business. Restaurant management and events-planning courses precede the cooking-centered class Colpitts and Mil co-teach on Wednesdays.

The nearly three-hour class teaches the students about the “back of the house” to, the instructors hope, make the kitchen newcomers better leaders in the future, and to appreciate the role of the chef. Different ways to cut vegetables and which knife corresponds with each technique, along with developing the students’ time management skills, illustrate a typical day in class.

For students such as USF junior Michelle Russen, who has worked in a restaurant for the last three years, the experience of cooking in class, rather than reading about cooking in a textbook, has been a positive one.

“I really prefer this hands-on approach,” Russen said. “I just feel like I’m learning so much more this way.”

As a whole, the students have responded as positively to the kitchen-turned-classroom as the individuals who teach them in the lab.

In response to the reviews, the instructors plan eventually to combine the two classes held each day, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, into one five-hour course.

Contact Amanda Sebastiano at [email protected].