Teams from two Oregon high schools will soon put their hospitality and culinary skills to the test at the National ProStart Invitational.
At the statewide competition last month, Crook County High School took the top prize in the culinary competition, while Salem-Keizer’s Career Technical Education Center won the restaurant management category. Both teams will compete against schools from across the country at the national invitational in Baltimore next month.
Riley McCartney is a member of the restaurant management competition team at CTEC. Tayah Hagensee mentored the culinary team at Crook County High School after competing for two years. She was also named this year’s Oregon ProStart Student of the Year. They join us with more details about what it’s like to pitch a restaurant or cook a three-course meal in front of a panel of judges.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. High school students can compete against each other in a huge variety of ways. There is civics – as we heard before the break – football, soccer and volleyball, math and chess, science fairs and livestock judging. Students can also face off with their hospitality and culinary skills. At a statewide competition last month, Crook County High School took the top prize in the culinary competition. Students from the Salem-Keizer Career Technical Education Center, or CTEC, won the restaurant management category. They’ll soon put those skills to the test against teams from around the country. That’s next month at the National ProStart Invitational in Baltimore.
Riley McCartney is a member of the restaurant management competition team at Salem-Keizer CTEC. Tayah Hagensee mentored the culinary team at Crook County High School this year. She was also named this year’s Oregon ProStart Student of the Year. They both join us now. Tayah and Riley, welcome to the show.
Tayah Hagensee: Thank you.
Miller: Tayah, first – how did you first get involved in the culinary program at your high school, at Cook County High School?
Hagensee: Funny thing, my dad is the instructor at Crook County. So I’ve been going to the same competition since I was about 5. And then when I got into high school, they weren’t doing it because of COVID, but then my sophomore year, I was able to join the team.
Miller: What do you remember about being a 5-year-old and watching these high schoolers? Did you even know what they were doing?
Hagensee: No, I just knew that it was stressful because I remember my dad always being super stressed out about that day. But I didn’t know much. I remember I went to a few of their practices as well, and I knew that they’re cooking something and had a short amount of time to do it, but I didn’t know a ton.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for what the culinary piece of this competition actually looks like? What do students have to do?
Hagensee: They have one hour and two butane burners to cook two plates each of an appetizer, entree and dessert. They’re judged on all sorts of things like sanitation, knife skills, communication, plating, the way the food tastes, all sorts of things like that. And they’re basically judged on a point system.
Miller: How many members of a team are there that are cooking a three-course meal for two people in just an hour?
Hagensee: You can have four to five. The minimum is four people, but you can also have a fifth person to be a team captain. They don’t necessarily cook, but they can be on the outside of the square area to help with timing and leadership stuff. But yeah, four to five people.
Miller: You were a mentor to this year’s team, because for the last two years before this you were in the trenches, making sauces, sauteing or whatever. What was it like when you were the student competing in the previous two years?
Hagensee: It’s nerve-wracking. It’s terrifying, but it’s so much fun. I mean, I wouldn’t say the day we’re competing is necessarily super fun, but all of the practices and getting closer to your team, it’s just very rewarding, I guess. It was a very fun experience for sure.
Miller: What is practice like? As you say, the competition that day is less fun, but what are practices like?
Hagensee: Everyone usually has two practices a week, at my school at least. And we all try to work with schedules. It might be after someone gets done with practice or after school. But every single practice is the exact same, you practice what you plate. So you practice that one hour from start to finish, every single time. So it’s very repetitive, but it trains you for the actual day of competition. It’s the same stuff every time.
Miller: Do you have a huge clock that you’re staring at and sweating bullets as you look at?
Hagensee: Yeah, we have a few timers, I think, and we always have to call out the time every few minutes. It’s a little scary, but also during that hour time flies, so you don’t even really notice it that much.
Miller: Anybody who’s watched a baking or cooking competition probably knows that, because they’ve seen competitors and, “I can’t believe how fast it goes. It’s not like this in my home kitchen!” But that’s why you practice, I guess.
Riley, what about you? We’ve been talking about the culinary program, but as I mentioned, you and your team, you won at the state level, the restaurant management competition. What is that?
Riley McCartney: We start out with coming up with our concept and we have to get all of the details sorted out. There’s a lot of different things. We have four different sections that we have to prepare for – there’s five actually. We have critical thinking, concept, menu costing, operations and … I’m blanking. But we have to think everything through very thoroughly and we have a lot of this information that goes into our packet. That gets submitted and then we have to work on our presentation.
Miller: Is the basic idea here that you’re pitching a new restaurant, a business of a restaurant, as if you’re talking to potential funders?
McCartney: Essentially, yeah, and that’s what the presentation part is. We also go over any details that might not have been talked about in our packet that we wanted to mention, because there’s limits on how many pages we can use for each part of our packet.
Miller: What made you interested in this restaurant management side of the competition, rather than the culinary side that we were hearing about from Tayah?
McCartney: For me, I heard about this competition my sophomore year. When I got into my junior year, I got to see what both teams were like. I knew everybody that was on the management team last year that went to nationals and had a bit of a connection with them. And I didn’t really like the idea of cooking in front of a ton of different people because I get stressed out when I’m cooking and my mom walks in or something.
Miller: Right. So doing it with judges watching every move you made seemed like not a fun way to spend your afternoons.
McCartney: Yeah, specifically with cooking. With the presentation, it’s nerve-wracking at first, but then you get used to it. You know what you’re gonna say and you know how to answer what questions they might have.
Miller: There’s so many issues that you have to work out if you’re going to be making this pitch. And I think the one that maybe would be most obvious, for those of us who haven’t done this before, that you’d think about, is what kind of food you’re going to make. But what else do you have to consider when you’re trying to come up with what you hope will be a successful restaurant concept or pitch?
McCartney: Some examples would be, we design our menu as well, not just here’s what we’d have, but we have a visual for that. We also have our floor plan. We have to do a little bit of costing for one of the recipes that we chose. And standardizing those recipes as well.
Miller: What is the overall concept that you and your team came up with that won at the state level?
McCartney: Our concept is an enchanted forest themed restaurant with a focus on farm-to-table, Willamette Valley-based food. So a lot of our ingredients are things that you would find in the Willamette Valley or in Oregon.
Miller: When you say “enchanted forest,” do you mean the family-owned amusement park near Salem?
McCartney: No, no, no, it’s more like a magical forest.
Miller: OK, a generally enchanted forest. So, what kind of food would I get if I went to your enchanted forest restaurant?
McCartney: Some of the items we have on our menu would include a picnic platter, which is one of the appetizers. It’s like an adult lunchable almost, which is how I like to see it, with cheese, crackers and fruit.
Miller: Adult lunchable – that’s like the new name for charcuterie is adult lunchable.
McCartney: Pretty much, yeah. It’s like a mini charcuterie that you can share with others. We also have a woodland chicken, which is a balsamic roasted chicken with a lavender-honey glaze that is served with mashed potatoes and seasonal vegetables. Dessert, we have a 4th floor sundae, which is one of the ones we actually made. It was so much fun. It is ice cream with some brownies, pistachios, pistachio cake. It’s made to look like moss and some little meringue mushrooms.
Miller: Tayah, what was it like, after spending two years as a participant yourself, to step aside a little bit this year and be in more of an advisory role, being a mentor?
Hagensee: It was very different, but it was really cool to see more of the outside perspective of how everything operates, compared to when you’re inside actually doing it. You notice so much more, little things that can help the team to be more successful. Like, you notice when their station is dirty or you notice little tiny niche things like when their knife isn’t secured or when they need to communicate more. So that was super fun, just to see how the whole thing moves and operates from an outside perspective.
Miller: Were there times when you wished you could be in there, I don’t know, manning the saucepan?
Hagensee: Oh yes, for sure. There were times I was kind of living it through them and I was like, “Oh, I just want to be in there making that right now. That looks like they’re having so much fun.” But I already got to experience it, so it’s OK.
Miller: What did they make?
Hagensee: Let me try to remember. This year, we were making for the appetizer … it’s this, oh, how do I best describe this? I don’t have the menu completely memorized, but shrimp in this corn, avocado, crème fraîche. All different seasonings, like the salad, and then this avocado pretty ring. Then there’s some sauces around that. Then the entree is this pan seared salmon (so good!) with more sauces, these purple potatoes and they’re cut into little balls – that’s what the shrimp is laying on. It’s super cool. And then the dessert is a freezer cheesecake. So that’s really cool.
Miller: Icebox frozen cheesecake …
Hagensee: Frozen cheesecake, you got it.
Miller: How did it feel to see the team that you had mentored win the state title?
Hagensee: I was just so impressed. I knew they could do it this whole time, but hearing Crook County win was just … I was so proud. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was a very good feeling because I understood how much time and effort they put in. So, to see something so cool come out of that, I was very proud.
Miller: As I noted, you’re a senior now. Do you have any ideas for what you’d like to pursue as a career?
Hagensee: I’m actually going to OSU next year to study business and hospitality management. I definitely want to do some front-of-the-house stuff with my career, and I’d love to work in restaurants and resorts and that type of thing.
Miller: Front-of-the-house, so your time as a line cook is over?
Hagensee: I think it might be over, yeah.
Miller: You want to be in management.
Hagensee: Yes, I would love to.
Miller: Riley, what about you? Before we get to your future, what was it like for you and your team to win this state title?
McCartney: I honestly don’t know how to describe it. Sitting in that room when they were calling people’s names, I was shaking. I was so nervous because we had spent countless hours preparing for that moment. And when they called us up for first place, I just couldn’t stop smiling. I was so proud of everyone on our team. I knew we could do it. I knew we had it in us, but it felt unreal for a while.
Miller: But it’s very real. You are going to Baltimore with your team soon. Would you like to pursue some kind of restaurant or hospitality job as a career?
McCartney: Yeah, CTEC has definitely helped me realize what I want to do for a living. After I graduate, I plan on going to Chemeketa [Community College] for a food and beverage management certificate, I believe is what it’s called. And through CTEC, I’m able to get my OLCC and that’s relevant because what I really want to do is be a bartender.
Miller: Oh, get a license from OLCC so you can actually serve drinks.
McCartney: Yeah, but I can’t do that until I’m 21. I can only sell … not liquor, but other alcohol.
Miller: Well, Riley McCartney and Tayah Hagensee, thanks so much.
Hagensee: Yeah, thank you.
McCartney: Thank you.
Miller: Riley McCartney is a member of the restaurant management competition team at Salem-Keizer CTEC. Tayah Hagensee mentored the culinary team at Crook County High School and was named this year’s Oregon ProStart Student of the Year. They are both going to the national championships next month in Baltimore.
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