School portraits / Student accounts, 2024 and later
Head Chef, Sous Chef, Pastry Chef: All Still at School
At a sixth-form college in south Wales, the students run a restaurant with a full kitchen brigade. I tried the model at home on a Sunday.
At UWC Atlantic, a boarding college for sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds at St Donat’s Castle in south Wales, the students run a restaurant called Hot to Go. It has “a head chef, sous chef, and head pastry chef”, a kitchen team of more than twenty, baristas and over twenty rotating waiting staff. My kitchen also has a front of house. It is the youngest, shouting “It’s ready” up the stairs.
The restaurant exists because a second-year student, Yago Ferretti Gonzalez, turned an abandoned kitchen into one. I also have an abandoned kitchen. It is mine, at about four o’clock on a Sunday, after the roast.
Neve Howells-Aitken, on its management team until March 2024, wrote it up for the magazine Ripples. In her last year it gave over £3,500 to scholarship fundraisers, served 50 to 100 people a week, and fed students on the college’s financial support for free while costs climbed. So I tried the model. The eldest was head chef, our daughter head pastry chef. My husband was the rotating waiting staff, and rotated, chiefly, towards the television.
Neve also researched cooking only with hyper-local ingredients, and found the limited produce would narrow the menu, which would restrict customers and the charity. The college has its own student-run organic farm. We have a rhubarb plant. I ran the same study. The menu was limited. The customers were restricted, mainly by threats.
Our head pastry chef made a hyper-local rhubarb crumble and charged £2 a portion, the only part of the business model she took in. Hot to Go funds scholarships. Ours funds Haribo. When I raised this she quoted Ripples at me: their “financial model is also sustainable so that our impact on the community is long-lasting”.
I had read it to her at breakfast.
Sources
- Neve Howells-Aitken, Enterprise on the menu, Ripples, 2024, pp.30–32
- UWC Atlantic, The School
- Theo Brundin public reflection, with Yago Ferretti Gonzalez’s founder account
- David Emery, The Valley organic farm at Atlantic College, 20 September 2023
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column