How a Georgia high school classroom became a fine dining restaurant
MACON — At mid-morning one Friday last month, a restaurant that doubles as a high school classroom was set to open for another sold-out, four-course lunch.
In the kitchen, a few dozen students, along with their culinary instructors, were putting finishing touches on the day’s menu: Caribbean coconut and sweet potato soup, jerk red snapper, goat curry and, for dessert, pineapple flan.
One student fluffed steamed rice. A few taste-tested the soup. A couple of others kept an eye on the slow-stewing goat.
“Don’t,” said Stuart Hardy, 37, the executive chef-educator in charge, “go crazy with the heat.”
A couple of times a month during the school year, the restaurant, the Compass Rose Cafe, opens to the public. For about $20 each, patrons, days in advance, reserve the 70 or so available meal slots and pack the dining room. Some travel more than an hour to pass through a nondescript side door at W.S. Hutchings College and Career Academy and into a rare gastro-instructional incubator.
About 80 high schoolers a year are enrolled in the academy’s culinary arts program. Most are bused in from their local high schools for cooking-related coursework.
Their off-the-beaten-path restaurant tucked atop a neighborhood hillside north of U.S. 80 is believed to be the only of its kind in Georgia: an honest-to-goodness eatery staffed and operated by high school students during school hours for course credit.
Hardy, the chef, is the reigning public school teacher of the year in Bibb County. Some of his midstate students have aspirations to open eateries of their own or embark on careers in food service. Others enroll to learn the ropes of the working world while collecting life skills.
On this Friday, Hardy used a moment of calm before the cafe opened to remind the teens about one of the keys to running a smooth kitchen. It had nothing to do with cooking. Rather, it was about the importance of communication.
“We ring in food verbally,” Hardy told them, explaining how servers call out orders and, in response, amid clattering dishes, voices are a main ingredient in moving food toward tables.
Hardy told students he wanted food on plates to be “centered and tight,” not sloppy, as it moved along what amounted to a human conveyor belt. He emphasized their need to be extra clear when speaking. When orders arrive from the dining room, he said, the kitchen must acknowledge with a “heard!” Their repeating of the orders would not be unlike the call and response between air traffic controllers and pilots. Clarity begats speed.
“We want to sell hot soup. We don’t want to wait on soup,” Hardy said. “Remember, the first course sets the tempo.”
Then the day’s Caribbean-style dessert, pineapple flan — or, rather, its evaporated milk — became a teaching point.
“Why,” Hardy asked, “is that the milk of choice and not cream in some places? … That’s right, because it’s an island country and they don’t have access to dairy like we do.”
The students compete in culinary contests against other career academies across the state. They have won those overall competitions four times in the decade since Hardy was hired.
One of the Hutchings graduates has gone on to manage a wine bar in Macon. Another has managed a local brew pub, and another runs an area Waffle House.
“We have little success stories all over,” Hardy said.
He has taken the idea for the student-run eatery to new heights with a food truck and a catering service. His students — high school sophomores, juniors and seniors from Bibb and Twiggs counties — are dually enrolled at Central Georgia Technical College for college credit.
Janylah Strong, a junior at Howard High in Macon who is in her second year at Hutchings, has learned knife skills, how to carve chicken and how to build menus. She wants to be an Air Force chef.
“I’ve learned to cook many different cuisines from around the world,” Strong, 16, said as she carefully removed flan from baking dishes and placed it on a serving saucer.
Aniya Green, an 11th grader at Twiggs County High, hopes to attend the Culinary Institute of America and someday have her own pastry shop.
“As I see the work we put into this, I see why (restaurant work) is so stressful for people back here in the kitchen,” Green, 16, said. “It gets a little chaotic.”
Hardy taps into that real-world intensity and uses it as a teaching tool.
First-year students act as servers, hosts and bus tables. Second- and third-year students are cooks, chefs and dishwashers. Their names are stitched on their black-and-white uniforms, which they launder at the academy.
“They call each other ‘Mister or Misses, last name only,’” Hardy said. “We preach professionalism. We call it the three Ps: present, prepared, professionalism. … We change the way they dress, the way they talk. We change the mentality to introduce them to a new level of expectation. And most of the time, they really appreciate and enjoy that. It is difficult.”
Later, in the dining room, a group of women from Griffin who are regular customers at the Compass Rose sat along a back wall. “This is like a Michelin-star restaurant with all the unusual, daring dishes,” one of the women, Isabelle English, said. “Every dish is a discovery.”
Over the years, students have served ostrich, octopus, rabbit, crawfish, prawns, whole mahi mahi, venison, duck, truffles from Italy. Hardy said there is “no real value in me writing a menu you could go to Olive Garden and get.”
Hardy, a Michigan native, was introduced to fine cooking by his father. His dad worked in sales but subscribed to Food & Wine magazine and, from the recipes in it, perfected grilled salmon teriyaki and seared rainbow trout with green sauce. “He wasn’t a chef at all, but he took an interest in food,” Hardy said. “We always had extravagant weekend meals.”
Hardy went to work in restaurants while still in high school and later became classically trained in culinary arts.
As a chef and instructor now, he teaches more than cooking. He helps introduce students to the grind of a job, a taste of it anyway, and what it takes to succeed in the working world. And his ambitious menus are, in ways, atlases.
“The first thing we do when we introduce a new menu — it’s my favorite game,” he said. “I’ll pull up the world map with no names or labels on the entire globe. I’ll say, ‘All right, guys, we’re doing a menu on South Korea. And I’ll say, ‘Who can point on the map to where South Korea is? … Who can point on the map where Spain is, Italy, anything?’ Nine times out of 10, they cannot even close to guess where the countries are.”
Hardy said he and the school’s other instructors can teach the art of cutting meat and simmering sauces, but they can’t always open their students’ eyes to the ways of the world.
“I can’t train you to show up on time, to be respectful and to have a work ethic,” he said. “That has to be ingrained in you.”
Still, the Compass Rose has become part of the path to getting there for scores of his students.
“In public education, we have to take that charge,” Hardy said. “We have to be able to teach those skills. And they’re called soft skills, but I don’t think they’re soft at all. I think they’re the most prominent thing you should be learning.”
About the Author
Joe Kovac Jr. is Macon bureau chief covering Middle Georgia for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
