Oak Forest HS Culinary Arts Class Presents 'The Breakfast Club'

Oak Forest High School students Rory McAuliffe, Devin Harvey and Isaiah Iribe work hard to put a breakfast together for faculty and staff last week during a special project in their Introduction to Culinary Arts class called: The Breakfast Club.

The project, masterminded by Oak Forest High School teacher Mark Furstenau, was to have the class develop a concept for a restaurant to serve breakfast to faculty and staff.

The class came up with the idea “The Breakfast Club” based on the famous 80’s movie of the same title. Going along with the theme were invitations for staff members, which were designed to look like detention slips. All menu items were named after the characters of the Breakfast Club such as the princess, the criminal, the brain, etc. Faculty and staff were served a variety of foods including eggs, pancakes, French toast, bacon, sausage and toast.

Students worked in the kitchen area and served faculty and staff in an adjacent classroom. Over the course of the hour, students served 30 covers, which is culinarese for how many people were served breakfast. Staff members reported to The Breakfast Club, gave student waiters their orders. The wait staff brought that back to the kitchen and the kitchen staff cooked it fresh for the staff member. All of this was done to mimic life in a real food service kitchen.

The executive chef for the restaurant was Joshua Hernandez and Nathan Kitchens was his sous chef. The front of the house manager was JaRon Johnson, the menu designer was Kailee Papendik, and the invitation manager was Caitlin Burke.