Hey guys, this is a question for anyone who has experience working in a professional kitchen.
So I'm a student at Northwestern in Chicago and I recently started a culinary student group to give students an opportunity to develop a passion for cooking. Stella culinary has been a godsend in helping me get ideas for the group and we've already done a few basic techniques and dishes.
One of the things I'm in the process of organizing is a end-of-term "restaurant night" where the students in the club will get to work together to run a dinner service where they will showcase the dishes they've learned to professors, guest chefs, and other VIP guests. So far I have about 8 students who want to do this and about 50 guests who are pretty eager to dine at our pop-up restaurant. Our window will be about 3-4 hours to get service done.
Obviously we are young and inexperienced but we are ambitious and passionate as well and really want this to happen so I wanted to ask you all for advice. Could someone just give me a general idea of the logistical factors that would be essential in making this work? I probably can't think of all the things I need to ask to get what I need to know, but things like: how many servers is reasonable for that many guests over that stretch of time? How many cooks would we need to serve those guests? How do you expedite? Which kitchen positions would the students need to fill (chef de cuisine, sous chef, line cook, garde manger, etc.)? How does a maître d run head of house operations? Things like that? Any help would be appreciated greatly; we can't do this alone and this has been on all of our minds like our crushes in middle school! I literally have people emailing me at 3 in the morning saying that they couldn't sleep and just had another idea for plating one of the dishes, how we could decorate the room, or places we could get chefs jackets embroidered with our group name so we could look more professional. A few people even asked if we could refer to each other as "chef" while doing this. It's crazy!
My main question though is about the menu we should have at this event. We wanted to go the fine dining route with amuse bouche and a 4-5 course tasting menu but I just wanted to ask if this is feasible? I figured doing a tasting menu would be easier since we wouldn't need to worry about everyone at a table ordering an enitrely different dish but I just wanted to be sure. Are tasting menus easier to execute than a la carte menus? And if we do go the tasting menu route, how should we pace the meal (like how much time between courses) and how should we vary the courses presented (hot appetizer, cold appetizer, entree, dessert?) something like that? Lastly, if doing a tasting menu, how should the work be divvied up among 8 people serving 50?
Thanks for your help guys! I can't tell you how excited I am about this and how much I want this to happen. I know that my head is in the clouds right now and that's why I wanted to ask you guys to give me a dose of reality.