When most students vacated campus for the summer, four Hospitality Retail and Sport Management students braved the heat to cook up meals on the historic Horseshoe.
With the help of some professors, Paige Hagen, Ashton Rotella, Monica Rikabi and Mason Harris discovered what it takes to run a restaurant.
The students operated the USC Garden Grille for lunch Tuesday through Friday for their summerlong internships. They served up hamburgers, hot dogs and grilled chicken sandwiches each day, as well as chicken quesadillas and Greek wraps on a rotating schedule.
Students who took the HRTM 270 class last semester were offered invitations to apply for the internship through emails and class visits from Neal Smoak, director of the McCutchen House.
Hagen, who was interviewed by Smoak after submitting her application, said she was offered a position on the day she applied.
“I did really well in the 270 class and I had a passion,” Hagen, a fourth-year hospitality management student, said. “I want to open a restaurant. It’s really interesting. I actually wanted to be there and do everything they were doing.”
The four students would arrive at the Garden Grille early in the morning and begin preparing meals for the next few days. They set up outside to start grilling, ensuring that the restaurant would be ready for when the first customers arrived at 11:30 a.m.
While their customers ate their meals, the students not only served them, but also took time to talk to them and get to know them. They would have lunch themselves at about 1:30 p.m., and start cleaning up at 2 p.m.
Though all of this was quite a task for the students, third-year hospitality management student Rotella said the hardest part of the experience was making sure they opened on time.
According to Hagen, however, it was the heat that accompanied grilling outside.
“I worked on the grill outside, the grill is like a million degrees and I really thought I couldn’t do it. I had never grilled in my life, and I served probably over 400 people,” Hagen said. “It was really cool to be able to say there were days we served 200 in an hour and there were just four of us.”
Even though outdoor grilling was a skill she never expected she would need, the experience changed her opinion of the style.
“I don’t want to have a grill outside anymore, but it was definitely cool to see how the front of the house works versus the back of the house, and especially in owning a restaurant you have to know how the back of the house is going to work in the front of the house,” Hagen said. “If they don’t have a good relationship you’re not going to have a successful restaurant. I think it’s really important that you get your hands in as many aspects of that business as you can.”
Accompanying the students on this enterprise were a few professors to help them along the way. The students were able to get to know professors they had taken classes from in the past on a more personal level and had the opportunity to meet professors they expect to take classes from in the future.
“My favorite part would be working so closely with my professors, just because they give you a really cool networking opportunity that not a lot of other students get,” Hagen said. “I wouldn’t be afraid to go to their office and ask them questions or have them recommend me to classes or jobs.”
Rotella believes the internship was fun and rewarding because of the opportunity to work alongside experienced chefs and apply skills and concepts learned in the classroom. Yet the experience wasn’t all fun and games — one of the most grueling parts was cleaning the kitchen.
“That was probably the hardest part, 76 hours of cleaning. You have to get into the ovens and clean them out. The walls are stainless steel, and you have to scrub those,” Hagen said. “That was probably the most challenging because my passion isn’t really cleaning.”
But through all the ups and downs, Rotella and Hagen have become even more convinced of their future careers.
“It solidified [my plans] a little bit more,” Rotella said. “I did want to go into the restaurant business, and after doing this internship I’m quite sure that’s what I want to do.”