BCA students broaden their international tastes

Manaaki Restaurant was taken over on Wednesday by 2nd year students from the Bachelor of Culinary Arts programme, who opened a special pop-up restaurant ‘The Global Table’ for the day.

Students were split into groups and challenged with creating 5 authentic international dishes to sell to Otago Polytechnic ākonga and kaimahi, for dining in or takeaway.

To increase the difficulty and learning experience of the project, each group was allocated a country with food scarcity or food insecurity issues.  They researched popular traditional dishes inspired by countries outside their usual comfort zone, including Myanmar, South Sudan, Palestine, and Mali.

Ruby Jenkins' group drew Sudan for their project, and the second year culinary arts student says they enjoyed the challenge.

"We had no idea what to make initially."

"After doing some research, we decided to create a Sudanese bean curry, featuring a spiced chilli, crisp lime yoghurt, and a red onion topping, with some fresh herbs and a crepe.  So trying to keep the dish true to form, but also make it a little bit more exciting for our setting here."

Wednesday's pop-up restaurant was the second time the class created these dishes for sale. For this round, they were had to add some marketing and advertising to the mix to evaluate how that impacted sales, while also making tweaks to their original recipes following diner feedback and to help improve profits.

The BCA project was part of a financial paper, which Senior Lecturer Timothy Lynch says added to the juggling act for students.

"So what we're looking at is, how do we accurately cost out a dish of food to make profit from it?"

"It sounds like an incredibly simple thing. But when you start to put things like labour costs into it, when you start putting food costs into it, in the middle of a really inflationary period, it becomes a lot more sophisticated than it used to be."