OCC’s culinary students are now serving up dinners at Captain’s Table restaurant

Ahoy, hungry mateys!

After years of serving up lunch, Orange Coast College’s instructional on-campus restaurant, The Captain’s Table, is offering its first ever dinner service.

This semester, the restaurant has opened its doors at 5 p.m. on Thursday evenings for the public.

Culinary arts program coordinator Bill Barber and other instructors at Coast decided to add the nighttime dining option after noticing the crowd the lunch hour drew.

“We’ve had to turn some people away before,” Barber said. “But primarily, this change is for the students. We’re trying to increase the number of classes we offer in our program.”

Barber’s class cooks for the lunch hour while instructor Bryce Benes’ class takes over the dinner hour. Students in both classes are studying the curriculum under Coast’s Culinary Principles 3 course, which focuses on the proper execution of American regional cuisine and preparing food in a banquet style setting.

And they apply those concepts directly into The Captain’s Table.

The restaurant’s weekly dinners have all related to the semester’s American regional theme. The classes have been cooking up the popular bites of New England, Florida, New Orleans, the Rocky Mountain states, the Northwest and other locations.

Meals are served in a banquet style, where they come out of the kitchen course by course starting with an hors d’oeuvre, appetizer, entrée, then finally a dessert.

The same menu is used for both lunch and dinner.

“It’s a rush and good practice,” culinary student Kristin Friedersdorf said. “It gives us a small taste of what the pace is like at a restaurant service.”

When assembling the menu for the Midwestern states this past month, Barber had students make a Turkey Horseshoe, a sandwich from his hometown of Springfield, Ill., that was invented at the city’s historic Leland Hotel in 1928. The treat was a tribute to the many horsemen that frequented the hotel.

Coast students whipped up the Turkey Horseshoe with brioche, aged white cheddar and roasted turkey.

Bryce’s students took over the kitchen Thursday night to prepare their duck tamales, black bean cakes, bacon-wrapped turkey tenderloin, chili braised lamb shank and pumpkin-nut spiced cookies.

Their theme that evening was foods of the Southwest.

“In addition to preparing the food, we have to learn about the history of where it came from,” culinary student Michael Bates said. “For the Southwest, we learned about the ingredients the Spanish brought like cinnamon, their livestock, cheese, chili, beans and corn.”

The classes will end the semester with the cuisine of California and Hawaii.

Beyond the kitchen, students in Coast’s food production management and dining room service programs set the tables and serve the restaurant’s guests.

In tribute to the duck tamales served that night, they folded the dinner napkins into a shape known as the “Duck Tail” where a triangle has two flaps, or the “feathers,” beneath it. The students study a book with diagrams of 150 different napkin folds.

“They learn a lot about set-up,” dining room service and management instructor Erin Tripp said. “For instance, last week we had a long table that seated 14 and we noticed the conversations at that table were broken up. So this week, they decided to arrange the tables for six people.”

Next semester, the restaurant will whip up meals from across the globe with their international menus. Guests will also be able to order their choice of food from the menu that semester, rather than eating in a banquet style.

According to Benes, the dinner hour has been met with around 65 guests per night.

“There’s a bigger turnout than for lunch,” Benes said. “Lunch is more of a work break for the guests that come in. But with dinner, they can really take their time and enjoy their evening.”

While The Captain’s Table is open to the public, reservations are recommended.

The restaurant’s seating hours are noon and 5 p.m. on Thursdays. The restaurant is between the Bursar’s Office and the Student Center off Fairview Road. Both lunch and dinner are $14 per person.

Reservations can be made at (714) 432-5935, Ext. 4.