The Warrior Cafe reopened to teachers in February, after returning to the school in the spring of last school year.
“The reason why I opened the restaurant was because it offers my students to develop some skills that otherwise I wouldn’t be able to offer them in a classroom,” said teacher Rolando Molina.
Molina said menu items change as students learn more in the class.
“We change the menu, we keep coming up with new dishes, with different flavors we explore,” he said. “We can change the menu when learning new techniques.”
Molina said the students have a chance to learn about the restaurant’s working system. He said students get to work with actual restaurant stations, such as the management station, grill station, fry station, and saute station, and they develop different skills at different stations.
“It just offers them real-world experiences,” he said.
Andrew Wolfe, a senior at Norwalk, is one of the students who works at the Warrior Cafe.
“It’s a great experience for those who either enjoy making food or they want to go to culinary school and pursue a degree in culinary arts,” he said.
Wolfe said he’s gotten to make different foods, and his favorite is working at the fry station.
“The hardest part would just be learning to make the new food because it’s your first time doing it,” he said. “It’s something new that you have to experience. But once you make it a few times, you can do it whenever you need to.”
Sabrina Hautekeete, a sophomore at Norwalk, also works at the Warrior Cafe. She said there’s a nice quality of food there.
“The most popular dish so far has been our chicken pasta,” she said. “It’s an Alfredo cream sauce, chopped-up chicken, and some Linguine pasta.”
Hautekeete said when working in the Warrior Cafe, having confidence leads to success.
“As long as you have confidence, you can get everything done on time,” she said. “You never really feel rushed. In the kitchen, it’s all about confidence.”
Hautekeete said she appreciates getting this type of experience in the kitchen.
“A lot of times people in this category aren’t old enough to work in a professional kitchen,” she said “It is a great experience for people who want to go into that kind of field.”
