River Aquino '27 overturned a ramekin on a bed of finely sliced cucumber, lifting it to reveal a perfectly round stack of avocado, rice, vegetables, shrimp salad and seasonings, to applause from three fellow chef assistants. After this success, the group shifted to the fryer where chef instructor Christian Latimer taught them how to fire up a batch of truffle fries.
Chef assistants for the Restaurant Management course in the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration learned how to make a shrimp salad appetizer.
The students are chef assistants for this semester's Restaurant Management class, a long-time pillar of the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration's curriculum, and it was their first time cooking in the newly renovated Grailer Food Lab's full-service kitchen.
"We can definitely tell that the kitchen here is built for efficiency," said Isabelle Louis '26. "It's really nice to have a very efficient setup so that we can run a full-service restaurant while teaching and learning and having students understand how it works."
The chef assistants, all hotel administration majors in the Nolan School in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, support the sophomores and juniors currently enrolled in the class as they learn all aspects of the food service business by running a real restaurant - Establishment - in Statler Hall.
Chef assistant Nicole Beamon '26, a hotel administration major in the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, prepares an order of truffle fries in the new full-service kitchen space of the Grailer Food Lab.
The food lab recently reopened after two years of renovations. Its new floor plan divided the space into two: the full-service kitchen in the front and a teaching kitchen with 14 work stations in the back.
"The new layout of the lab is more conducive to learning," said chef instructor Robert White, associate director of instructional support and lab operations in the Nolan School. "It's much easier for us to teach in and make sure that everybody's getting the same information."
A separate service kitchen will also make it easier to teach two classes at once and support clubs and special events like the student-run Hotel Ezra Cornell conference.
"It just looks bigger, even though it's literally the same footprint," said Heather Kolakowski '00, senior lecturer in food and beverage management at the Nolan School.
The space is pioneering energy efficiency, too, going all electric and using induction technology for stoves, ovens and fryers. Induction heating uses a magnetic field to send alternating electric currents into a pan, heating the pan but not the burner, using less energy and cooking food faster than a gas flame.
"We don't have any gas into the lab, which makes the environment that much better for us," White said. "There's no carbon monoxide, and there's no residual heat from gas range tops."
