Written by: Melanie Yeager

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Florida State University hospitality management students are showcasing their skills with a donated holiday dinner to Big Bend Hospice.

On Tuesday evening, Nov. 20, the students will prepare a Thanksgiving meal for 50 people, including stuffed Cornish game hens and wild rice, and transport it from the University Center Club to Hospice House across town. Aramark, FSU's dining services provider, is assisting with the delivery. "We volunteered for it. We figured it would be a good cause and a challenge," said Ben Curtis, general manager of the student team presenting the dinner. Hospice House manager Barbara Roberts said guests to the dinner will include house residents and some members of their families, hospice staff and physicians. Big Bend Hospice relies heavily on volunteers and donations, but this dinner is unique, she said. "We've never had anything on this scale," Roberts said. "I think it's going to be a wonderful opportunity to have families, staff and other people embrace the holidays."

Professor Charles LaTour

Tuesday's event is the final dinner this semester in the Ashby Stiff Little Dinner Series, which is carried out by students in the catering management course at the College of Business' Dedman School of Hospitality. Seniors in this capstone course use the series to apply all they have learned during their tenure at FSU.

"Up to now it's been in textbooks. Now they have to get it done through other people," said Charles LaTour, who teaches the course.

In existence since 1958, the Ashby Stiff Little Dinner Series provides a simulation of the real world of catering or managing a restaurant. The series runs for eight weeks each semester at the University Center Club. Each week's dinner party has a different theme, carried out by a different management team of five or six students who fulfill the roles of general manager, service managers, steward, assistant chef and chef. The rest of the class serves, helps cook or washes dishes -- all hands are necessary to prepare a feast for 90 to 100 people.

Guests for the recent Italian night dined on traditional Ligurian pasta and parmesan-sage-crusted veal scaloppini. Flamenco dancers entertained for an Argentina-themed dinner. FSU Provost Lawrence G. Abele hosted the Titanic night; students recreated the dinner served on the ill-fated ocean liner. Students presented guests to Key West Night their menu in a bottle.

"I want them to buy into it," LaTour said of the students' efforts. "It's their theme, their dinner . . . Students are very bright -- even those with little culinary skills rise to the challenge, and they get it done."

Only 20 percent of this capstone class involves an exam. The real test for students comes through peer evaluations and their responses to the work. Each team also prepares a hefty notebook for LaTour that includes every detail, from diagrams of food placement on the plate to recipe costing sheets, organizational charts and requisition lists.

"Every penny spent has to be recorded," LaTour said. "It's a very demanding course."

For more information about the College of Business, please go to www.cob.fsu.edu.