Next week, Lorena Tapia will manage her own restaurant for a night. She will be in charge of the table settings, the menu design and the presentation. She will manage the servers and will choose the amount of food to order and the table settings.

It’s a typical situation for restaurant managers all over the world. Tapia, however, is only an undergraduate student.

A senior hospitality and tourism management major, Tapia is taking ‘Food Service Management’, a required class for the HTM major where students manage all aspects of the Marriott Meals restaurant in the Marriott Center, located on the 11th floor of the Campus Center at the University of Massachusetts.

Each week, two students manage the entire restaurant on a rotating schedule. It is a project that counts for a large portion of their grade. Aside from that, it provides students with a practical learning experience in a school where many students are in a classroom learning theories.The students rotate positions in the restaurant on each of their weekly five-hour shifts. One week they might be washing dishes, the next they might be chopping vegetables and garnishing appetizers.

Chandani Buchan, a senior HTM major, was a server last week. She called the experience “nervewracking,” but loves how hands-on the class is.

“We learn things like basic cooking skills, and it’s extremely practical,” she said. “It really feels like we’re running the restaurant. We control everything.”

“It sometimes feels weird that we’re running a restaurant as kids, but I love it,” said Jessi Pergolotti, a senior nutrition major. “We learn to follow the recipes precisely and the equpiment is state of the art.”

Although the students are in charge of the restaurant, they do have help. Jenafer Andrén-Kazaunas has been the professor for the class for nine years and is helped by two other chefs. She came into the program with plenty of food service experience: she has worked in many restaurants and had her own catering business before getting a master’s degree and coming to UMass.

“The money from the meals is used to cover the costs of running the program,” Andrén-Kazaunas said. “We’re not here to make profit, but we do draw in people with our low prices, and that gives students the best opportunity to learn and practice. Even though we are a class, this is still an operation.

“We still have to run even if the students don’t show up,” she added. “It used to be more like a meal program, but now it’s more like real life operations.”

The transformation is in part thanks to donations from Marriott, which allowed HTM to purchase industry standard equipment.

“Now it’s a controlled environment for the students,” Andrén-Kazaunas said. “They get to learn things they will carry out with them into the job field.”

Bethany Levy, a senior HTM management, loves learning about all types of cooking. “I’ve never had experience in the back of the house [the kitchen], so it’s great to see how this all works,” Levy said. “It’s an awesome class.”

Katie Fishman, a senior nutrition major, said that the five-hour class lab is a big time commitment, but it’s way different than a lecture.

“It really shows us that we can manage a restaurant,” Fishman said. “We make things I haven’t heard of before.”

Two weeks ago the students made zucchini roulade, which Fishman had never had before but thought was delicious.

“A lot of professors teach to teach you the information, but we actually practice the information,” said Katie O’Neil, a senior HTM major. “We essentially are being taught how to run a restaurant, and we go through all the parts of it. Not only the different roles, from cook to manager to server, but also the in depth details that go into managing a restaurant. It’s so much more in depth than people think.”

O’Neil, who eventually hopes to own a wedding planning company, likes the class even though it’s not related to what she ultimately hopes to do.

“Jen really makes you feel like you can cook, as long as you follow the recipe, even though I’m bad at it,” she said. “But I’m learning. “It’s really good food,” O’Neil added. “You can get an appetizer, an entrée and a dessert for 10 dollars, because we do a bundle deal. And all the portions are really large.”

The Marriott Meals program is open to the public for lunch and dinner on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of each week.

Eleanor Harte can be reached at [email protected].