Campus cuisine: Good meals at bargain prices

At Portfolio Restaurant a uniformed hostess takes your coat and leads you to a table overlooking Elliott Bay. A server unfurls your napkins, takes your drink order and describes the soup du jour: potato with asparagus purée. She encourages you to consider the prix fixe menu: $18 for three courses; $29 if you would like wines paired with each course.

Portfolio is the Art Institute of Seattle's student-run dining room, one of several student-run restaurants at local culinary schools.

Not all the schools have Portfolio's enviable view or offer a wine list, but culinary-arts programs at Seattle Central, South Seattle and Edmonds community colleges, as well as at Renton and Lake Washington technical colleges, all operate restaurants as part of their curriculum. These student-staffed food-service operations include cafeterias, bakery counters, bistros, cafes and fine-dining rooms. They function as hands-on laboratories where chefs-in-training — supervised by a chef instructor — create menus and execute recipes, plus get valuable front-of-the-house experience as well.

What's in it for the public? Good food served in a gracious setting at prices that are less than you might pay at a top-drawer downtown restaurant. Less tangibly, there's the thrill of experiencing talent in the raw: Tomorrow's culinary stars could be cooking right now at a school near you.

The restaurants — Square One, Bistro International, The Culinaire Room, Alhadeff Grill or Cafe Alki — fly under reviewers' radars. And they don't advertise, largely out of deference to other restaurants in the neighborhood that, unlike the school dining rooms, need to make a profit. Still the school restaurants attract a coterie of regulars from the faculty, staff and student body, local businesses and nearby retirement communities.

"We try to fill up the dining room without stepping on the toes of local businesses and we can always use more people. The students need someone to cook for," says Tom Dillard. As Seattle Central's dining-room instructor, he oversees two full-service restaurants on the second floor of the school's Capitol Hill campus: Square One, a bistro serving seasonal Northwest cuisine; and One World Dining, an international cafe; as well as the grab-and-go Chef's Express.

Julia Kissel, who with her husband, Francois, once owned the French restaurant Maximilian in the Market, enjoys them all. Her office is two blocks from the school and she lunches there frequently, taking friends from all over the world. "I love it that you can eat haute cuisine one day, or a great sandwich the next, and the pastry is as good as any you'll find in Paris," she says.

"Lunch in The Culinaire Room is Renton's best kept secret," says Doug Medbury, culinary-arts director at Renton Technical College. He's referring to the dining room on the lower level of the Roberts Campus Center. There the five-course tasting menu will set you back $15.95 and among the roster of "Aristocratic Entrees" you might find delicately poached halibut sauced with kumquat beurre blanc for a mere $7.50. Pressed for time? They'll package to go here and at most of the other school dining rooms, too.

Most school restaurants operate in conjunction with the quarterly school calendar, but Medbury keeps the Culinaire Room open with paid staff even when the college is between quarters because it attracts a steady clientele from nearby offices: King County, Boeing and Paccar. Without the team of 40 students around to share the workload, however, the menu offered between quarters is considerably less ambitious.

The end of the quarter often means special events for which reservations are advisable. At Seattle Central, graduating students take a turn as "Chef of the Day" and present an original four-course prix-fixe menu ($15-$20). Lake Washington Technical College celebrates the end of the quarter with an eight-course dinner ($50 including wine). At The Art Institute's quarterly Winemaker's Dinners, upper-level students create, cook and serve a five-course meal paired with wines ($75). The calendar of events at South Seattle Community College includes High Tea ($16.95/spring and summer quarter), the Grand Buffet ($18.95/winter) and Connoisseur's Luncheons ($21.95) held four to five times each quarter.

Front-of-the-house experience is just as important as teaching kitchen skills to future chefs.

"Eighty percent of our culinary students say they want to own a restaurant someday," says David Coan, an instructor at Lake Washington Technical College. "I tell them even if you are the chef, you've got to know what's going on in the front of the house."

Coan manages Bistro International, and his service and hospitality course is required for all first-quarter students, some of whom are not yet 18.

"It's like opening a new restaurant every quarter," says Coan, whose patience is matched by his energy. "I train people from ground zero every three months. My goal is to instill in them the importance of consistency so that when they leave they know what they are doing."

They'll also know at least 10 napkin folds. "I tell them to put that on their résumé too," he says.

Coan is proud of the fact that in the four years since he started teaching his course, service has improved in the bistro and so have revenues, though like all of the school dining rooms, they don't price the menu to make a profit, only to cover costs. Students don't accept tips either. If you leave one, it's considered a donation to the school and it goes into a fund for scholarship programs, new equipment purchases or student competition fees.

In the kitchen, chef instructors are in charge and students typically don't work the hot line until they have completed several quarters. They start by doing prep work and honing their knife skills before advancing through a series of cooking rotations. Glitches happen: with students at the stove, things don't always go as planned.

At Portfolio, minutes after describing the soup du jour the server returns to offer apologies. There would be no soup tonight, after all.

I hazard a guess. "Something went awry with the soup?"

"Apparently so," she answers, never losing her smile. "Chef says, maybe later."

Providence Cicero: providencecicero@aol.com