Hart School unveils new culinary teaching space
College of Business
SUMMARY: After decades of making do with makeshift cooking spaces, the hospitality management program has a new teaching kitchen and lab.
Pictured (L-R): Tim Miller, Nick Langridge, Kim Foreman, Charlie King, Michael Busing, Heather Hart and Tassie Pippert
The new Hart School Instructional Kitchens space couldn’t make hospitality management lecturer Tassie Pippert any happier. Looking back on the last decade of using borrowed space in dietetics and portable appliances to teach her HM 312 Culinary Arts & Menu Planning class wasn’t full of fond memories, process-wise. “It’s not the way you want to teach somebody how to cook. Because of limited space, I couldn’t store everything I needed to store. My house for the last ten years has really been Hart School kitchen central.”
Pippert now has her home storage back, and the Hart School has a fully equipped teaching kitchen and six-station lab for students to hone their culinary chops—with room to store all those perishable ingredients. The teaching area rivals anything seen on current cooking shows, with several overhead cameras and two large wall-mounted monitors so up to 30 students can watch Pippert or any number of guest chefs as they run through important techniques. The student lab area can accommodate up to six teams of three students, with each area containing the professional-grade stoves, refrigerators and many appliances the teams will need to make use of during the course of their study. iPads above the stations allow students to review taped lectures and reference ingredients as they work. There are even ADA compliant work areas for students or guests.
With help from Senior Vice President of Administration and Finance Charlie King, Pippert was able to come up with a dream list and find funding for all of it. As happy as Pippert is with the outcome, the real winners are the hospitality students. “They are in a space where they are creating something on the equipment that would be much more in tune with a professional setting,” she says.
Student assistant Bree Crump sees the requirement that all hospitality management students take HM 312 as essential. “Within the Hart school we take classes on various parts of the industry—it’s only right that we should take a full semester culinary class!” She says the new lab offers plenty of value for the students. “This kitchen will give them a better experience. By having their own space students are allowed more room to express creativity.”
Pippert and Interim Director of the Hart School Neil Marrin got to do the honors of cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony on Oct. 24, which was attended by several campus luminaries as well as Heather Hart.
