Four weeks of “Restaurant Week” begins Friday, November 13 and four Fridays of food feed the faculty.  

Marie Baker, Family and Consumer Science Teacher, and the fifth period Culinary Arts class began their first week of preparing food for this year’s first Friday of “Restaurant Week,” where they will be delivering food to any teachers that order from this week’s “restaurant.”  

“I [came up with the idea] when I started here four years ago.  A goal was to have a completely different intro into the foods world.  Instead of preparing food, it’ll actually be teaching them how to serve and take care of it as well,” Baker said.

Each of Baker’s four Culinary Arts classes is split up into kitchens, and every week, one “restaurant” from each of the kitchens is featured. The entire class works together to prepare that Kitchen’s “weekly special.”  Throughout the semester of the class, students don’t only learn how to make food, but they also learn about customer service, like in the food industry.

“I think it’s going to help us in college because we won’t have to spend as much money because we know how to make food for ourselves,” Jerry Brown, senior, said.  “Ms. Baker makes the class better too.  She’s very helpful with everything, with cooking and life scenarios.”

The experience is more than just learning how to cook, however,

“We do a whole packet where we talk about location, and price, and they make a whole menu. But because of the scheduling, we can’t have the classroom transformed into a restaurant, so [we] break it down and make weekly specials,” Baker said.  “This week there’s Noodle Guys, we’ve got a Mac N’ Cheese kitchen, we’ve got an Italian restaurant, and we’ve got a burger joint.”

The students are not the only ones who enjoy the class, but teachers get to experience how great of chefs, cooks, and bakers the class has actually become as they cook and deliver the meals to teachers.  

“This Friday is the first featured restaurant.  We have little Styrofoam to-go containers and they have the teachers names and then their location, where they put it to be delivered, because they fill out a Google Docs forum and then we package it and the kids take it and deliver it to the teachers,” Baker said.    

Not only does the class teach students about food but also about life skills in an environment where they can also have fun.

“It helps them enhance their food preparation skills which they’ll need every day of their life.  [It also teaches them] just kind of how they should be storing things and taking it really to the next level,” Baker said.