The Restaurateurs of the Sixth Grade

Orange balloons festooned the side door of Bethel AME Church on Dec. 6 and lined the corridor down to the Multipurpose Room, which had been transformed into a restaurant for the afternoon. Around the room, 120 diners sat at tables covered with dark violet tablecloths, waited on by middle-school students in violet T-shirts reading “Design Time Restaurant.” The whole thing had been designed by the students, down to the wall decor (more balloons).

This sort of thing doesn’t happen on a whim, of course. The kids had help--others, including caterers, donated their time, and the whole thing was sponsored by Lawry’s Foods, which has adopted seven schools in South-Central Los Angeles.

Monique Fischer’s sixth-grade social studies class at Audubon Middle School had submitted the winning proposal. “I’m certain they won because their idea was a multicultural restaurant,” said Fischer. “It’s valuable at this time. How can we come together if we don’t know about each other?”

It was intended to give students an idea of real-world business. They created their menu, interviewed caterers and suppliers of table settings and designed a business plan. The student waiters even planned their own “staff meal”--the food that restaurant employees eat. Theirs was hot chicken wings, mashed potatoes and salad.

Necessarily, this was a lesson in coming to terms with reality. The original idea had been to serve seven different cuisines, but by the day of the event, that had boiled down to three: Mexican (chicken enchiladas, rice and beans), African American (fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, greens) and Jamaican (jerk chicken, rice with peas and fried plantains).

But the sixth-graders had certainly been thinking big. “In their original plan, the restaurant was supposed to be in Malibu with windows facing on the ocean,” Fischer said, “and you could go to a movie for $5 extra. For baby-sitting, there was going to be a video parlor that kids could be dropped off in.”