On the menu: Helping of Lunch Club hospitality

The popular student-run Lunch Club at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has been running for almost 20 years.

The Lunch Club is a training ground for UL Lafayette's hospitality management majors, who learn how to run a restaurant from top to bottom.

Becky Dubois, instructor in the hospitality management program at the Moody College of Business, told us more about the students' experiences.

QUESTION: The Lunch Club has been a popular feature of life on the UL campus for faculty and staff. Describe what it is.
ANSWER: The Lunch Club is a student-run restaurant on campus that seniors in Hospitality Management and Dietetics operate. Lunch Club is actually a required course, Applied Food Service Management in the Hospitality Management program. Throughout the semester, students rotate positions to gain hands-on experience of a food-service operation. The restaurant, located on the second floor of Hamilton Hall, accommodates 46 guests each Tuesday and Thursday during the semester. Students prepare and serve a four-course meal including an appetizer, salad, choice of three entrees and choice of dessert for $12.

Q:What lessons do the students learn from the Lunch Club? How does it contribute to the curriculum?
A: Students begin planning for Lunch Club junior year by developing a business plan for a food-service operation. The business plan includes the concept, target market, marketing plan, startup costs, layout and equipment needs, recipes and menu design, costing and budgeting. That plan is carried over into HGMT 451 (Lunch Club). Each student is part of a management team that plans and carries out their restaurant concept within the four walls of Lunch Club. Students are given a budget and must execute the four-course meal for 46 guests. Lunch Club is the capstone course for Hospitality Management students incorporating knowledge from all of the required business courses.

Q: How long have you run the Lunch Club, and can you talk a bit about the genesis and history of the Lunch Club?
A: Lunch Club originally opened in the fall of 1988 as a lab for the College of Applied Life Sciences. Much of the equipment was donated from local businesses. I was an undergraduate student in Lunch Club in 1998 and was a lab assistant during graduate school. After finishing graduate school, I was offered a teaching position at UL in the Human Resources department. I became the Lunch Club instructor the spring of 2000 and have run the lab for about 30 semesters. Some of the original guests from 1988 still dine with us today in the restaurant.

Q:What are the main features of the hospitality program and what are some of your future plans?
A: The biggest asset of the Hospitality Management program at UL is the amount of hands-on experience the students obtain before they actually graduate. In the hospitality industry, a combination of knowledge and experience is needed. We want our students to be prepared to jump into management positions right after graduation. Last year, the program received the Accreditation Council for Programs in Hospitality Administration accreditation, which puts UL’s Hospitality Management program as the only accredited four-year program in Louisiana. The next big goal of the program is to renovate the food labs, for which we are currently seeking contributions or in-kind equipment donations.

Q: What are the opportunities for graduates of your program?
A: Since hospitality management graduates have the full suite of the common business knowledge required of all business majors, they make attractive employees for industries worldwide including tourism, resorts, events, lodging, food and beverage, transportation, health care and a host of other contexts where hospitality talent is needed.

Our graduates are able to find jobs locally as well as abroad; a recent graduate worked for a travel agent after graduating and now owns the company, and another graduate works for a Japanese airline.Graduates can work for large hotel companies in Lafayette or throughout the United States, and those interested in foodservice have the opportunity to work for independent or franchise operations as well as the distribution companies.

Those interested in experiencing the Lunch Club should e-mail lunch_club@ louisiana.edu.

Q&A portion from The Daily Advertiser, September 28, 2014