St. Michael café gets thumbs-up from diners

(Photos by Beth Donze, Clarion Herald; to view additional images, please go to the Clarion Herald’s Facebook page)

By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

As plates of breaded catfish, stuffed bell peppers and other savory goodies made their way to beautifully set tables inside St. Michael Special School’s Emeril Lagasse Teaching Kitchen, students experienced the thrill – and hard work – of providing guest diners with a hot, multi-course lunch during a three-day series of “pop-up” cafés held last month.

“Here ya go! Bon Appetit!” said St. Michael student and server Alanna Harvey, laying down the order of café customer Monique Christophe-McConduit.

“The food is great, but the service has been phenomenal!” raved Christophe-McConduit, who was attending the Feb. 22 pop-up with a coworker whose nephew attends St. Michael. “Alanna  is an extremely polite and attentive server.”

Christophe-McConduit’s tablemate – Marilyn Bernard – agreed, marveling at the unusual addition of apple croutons to her generous bowl of butternut squash soup, which came paired with a meaty club sandwich.

“The soup is light and creamy. The flavor is excellent!” Bernard said. “We look forward to returning!”

Following directions

Just like any restaurant worth its salt, good food requires weeks of behind-the-scenes planning, practice and prep. About two hours before the café’s opening time of 11:45 a.m., Tim Laurence, St. Michael’s culinary science teacher, directed his young sous chefs as they honed practical, fine-motor skills such as cutting open bags of frozen vegetables, using tongs to fish out tea bags and mint from pitchers of iced tea and placing leftover ingredients in the fridge. One of the jobs of student Paul Charles was to make chicken stock with cubes of bouillon and hot water. Charles’ classmate, Evan Cotney, juggled responsibilities that included placing cubed sweet potatoes into the oven for roasting and flipping them with a spatula, mid-bake.

“Sprinkle some Cajun seasoning on there so it’s not like the brown sugar-and-marshmallow sweet potatoes your grandmother makes,” Laurence instructed. “Who is going to open up this can of tomatoes? Who has muscles?” he asked, pointing to a batch of smothered okra awaiting its final ingredient. “Be careful not to cut your finger on the lid!”

Louisiana flair

At the café conducted on Feb. 22, the culinary science students were shadowed by volunteers from the local office of Service Corporation International (SCI), a provider of funeral, cremation and cemetery services. Members of the day’s wait staff went to their pre-assigned tables to take customers’ orders and relayed them to the kitchen, while other student crews plated the food and staffed the beverage cart.

“The coleslaw was lightly dressed, and the red onion gave it the pop that it needed,” noted diner Sandi Christiana, who ordered the slaw as a side to her catfish plate. “Everything was delicious!”

The menu was carefully planned by Laurence and his café staff. Because all St. Michael students are studying the human body in social studies this school year, the 2023-24 theme in culinary science is “Food for a Healthy Body.” Laurence’s students are learning to consult and interpret nutrition labels and are studying Louisiana’s “Harvest of the Month” foods through colorful posters and videos from the LSU AgCenter.

This “healthy and local” theme inspired a series of “practice cafés” operated by culinary science students last October, when Louisiana’s approaching citrus season was marked with a brunch of orange pain perdu, grits, yogurt with granola and smoothies made with protein-rich kafir.

“They like tasting things,” noted Laurence, who began working at St. Michael 10 years ago, initially as a math teacher. To date, he and his students have created eight annual pop-up café experiences, not even letting the “COVID year” stop them. Although in-person dining wasn’t possible, St. Michael’s culinary science students assembled bags of homemade focaccia bread and pasta as take-home meals for their families.

“What’s really fun is when a really picky student actually tries something and finds the thing they finally want to eat – the student who early on in the first year wouldn’t try anything, but by year two or three is saying yes to trying food,” Laurence said. “They get to taste everything we make, and they always get to take a sample home to mom and dad.”

At the pop-ups held Feb. 21-23, nearly two dozen tables were serviced, a number that allowed Laurence to rotate his students across just about every restaurant role. No one escaped one particular duty: washing the dishes, a task St. Michael’s culinary science students learn to do by hand and by dishwasher.

“It’s time to do the dishes. Yay! Dishes!” Laurence told his troops. “You’ve got to clean up one job before you go to the next one. It’s the most important part of running a restaurant, because if you don’t have clean dishes, you can’t serve food. Washing dishes is like taking a bath. You’ve got to scrub, right?”

The Emeril Lagasse Teaching Kitchen began with a $125,000 gift from Chef Lagasse after he won the trivia-based game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” in May 2000. Lagasse gave the funds to St. Michael Special School, and the kitchen was renovated shortly thereafter.

For a related story on some of the partnerships St. Michael Special School has developed with local schools and other community entities, please read the story below.

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St. Michael’s partnerships forge community ties

By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

St. Michael’s culinary science program – with its annual pop-up cafés – attests to the 1965-founded school’s dedication to teaching academics and life skills that will serve its exceptional learners well, both at home and in the workplace, said Dr. Elizabeth “Cissy” LaForge, St. Michael’s head of school.

LaForge said because many of her students thrive in jobs that have a routine and a connection to people, they have gone on to find employment in places such as Lambeth House, Superdome food services, the Acorn restaurant at the Louisiana Children’s Museum, Gambino’s Bakery and Robert’s grocery stores. Three St. Michael alumni currently are working in guest relations at Children’s Hospital, after having learned the ropes staffing the hospital’s coffee cart.

Helping St. Michael students make these strides are the school’s “Community-Based Instruction” classes, which have them doing everything from visiting the court system and the library, to going to the grocery store with a list of items to purchase.

“We’ll learn about (what to do at the given location) at school first, and then we’ll put it into practice out in the community,” LaForge said. “They go to the post office and buy a stamp; we ride the RTA –  just different things like that to get them in the community. They go to Subway and order a sandwich and pay for it with their own money. They recently went to Home Malone (gift store) to pick out something within their budget. These are ways they practice spending their money.”

Building relationships

LaForge said while volunteers are never turned away, St. Michael especially appreciates repeat helpers who either visit the Chippewa Street campus or invite St. Michael students to visit them … or do both.

For example, members of Tulane University’s baseball team visit St. Michael’s campus throughout the year, in groups of 10, to play and hang out with students during their recess and gym time. The venue switches to Tulane when the team hosts an annual baseball event on its home field. St. Michael students practice batting and fielding, spend time in the dugout and play a real game.

“It’s all about building relationships,” LaForge said. “Our kids already know the (baseball players), and so by the time they go to Tulane, they’re already settled.”

The two-way flow between St. Michael’s campus and the wider community is impressive. Last year, the on-campus Joy Center, which provides hands-on vocational training and school fundraising opportunities to St. Michael’s adult students, completed an order of 33,000 jingle-bell necklaces for Brennan’s restaurants.

Another large order involved partnering with the non-profit Grounds Krewe to make hundreds of “sustainable throws” that were tossed in this year’s Iris parade. Joy Center students filled burlap bags with boxes of uncooked jambalaya and red beans.

LaForge noted that schools and parishes looking ahead to fair season also may want to contact St. Michael for another service.

“If the school brings in the (empty) eggs, we will stuff them with confetti. We have a robust paper-shredding program!” she said.

LaForge also expressed appreciation for the many ongoing partnerships between St. Michael and other area Catholic elementary and high schools – relationships that include, and often go well beyond, their much-appreciated contributions of carnival beads to the Joy Center’s bead sorting/resale program.

Cases in point: Ursuline Academy sophomores visit St. Michael’s campus to conduct an annual project in which students study the saints, do a related activity, get their “passports” stamped and have lunch together; the law firm of Adams & Reese sponsors a basketball tournament at Brother Martin High that’s run by the high school’s basketball players, with support from the attorneys and other adult volunteers; the Academy of the Sacred Heart invites St. Michael students to be the dress rehearsal audience  for its annual eighth-grade play and brings a “Best Buddies” after school program to St. Michael’s girls; Mount Carmel Academy welcomes St. Michael youngsters to its campus for an annual Easter egg hunt; and last month, Archbishop Chapelle brought a “Girls’ Day” to St. Michael, complete with crafts and lunch.

“We want them to accompany our kids. It doesn’t matter what it is – it could be wiping the floor,” LaForge said. “We want the volunteers to connect with our students through a meaningful experience, and come back again and again!”

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