It begins like any other college lecture.

The instructor busies herself at the front of the classroom, tweaking the large screen readout from her laptop while students settle in their seats. Ready to begin, she steps toward the center of the room, silently gathering everyone’s attention toward her like a fisherman draws in a laden net.

If you know the signs distinguishing this from any other lecture, they’re there. The instructor is wearing a black short-sleeved coat seamed with a white stripe like a snazzy, high-necked tuxedo top. The students are in dressy whites. Some wear aprons. Backpacks have bulging from them long black bags—violin cases?

“Where were we last week?” the instructor asks the class.

Welcome to International Cuisine, CAHM-167, offered at Cabrillo College’s Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management program, held in the dining room of Pino Alto, a restaurant that serves the ecosystem of the program and the ecosystem of the Santa Cruz restaurant industry beyond that. It trains students in a public-facing laboratory in every aspect of the restaurant, from the kitchen to the front.

Those aren’t violin cases, they’re knife bags.

A student raises their hand.

“The Mediterranean,” they say.

“Right,” the instructor says. This is Chef Andrea Mollenauer: catering company owner, and chair of the CAHM program.

Each week, they “travel” to a different place, first learning the culinary tools and techniques of those regions in their reading and lecture, then employing them in the kitchen right through the doors behind us to craft a meal they will eat together.

As the discussion board indicates, today we are visiting North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Chef Andrea asks the class what two factors would cause tools and techniques to drift and permeate other cultures that did not originate them?

No answers bubble up. It is the first class of the day.

She answers for them: the spice trade, and the slave trade.

She draws distinctions between the lush tropical island of Zanzibar and its mother nation of Tanzania in East Africa, and other interior regions with scant water access.

“What [cultures] eat often has a lot to do with what they have access to,” she says.

This is important to teach in a nation, and this particular state, that has certain expectations about abundance—that access should not be affected by geographical or seasonal impediments (to say nothing of tariffs). As a former produce clerk, I was shocked how customers expected us to stock watermelon year-round, diluting quality in favor of availability.

The tools we will be utilizing today speak to the ingenuity of cultures finding water where there is want.

One is Tanzanian in origin: the mbuzi, a coconut grater in the form of a stool mounted with a saw-toothed blade, to make coconut milk from the pulp. The other is the North African and Moroccan tagine, a ceramic cookpot with a tall conal hood for steam to gather much higher than with a typical flat lid, circulating it and condensing at the top to drip back down and self-baste food, almost the way moisture condenses in clouds to fall as rain.

A technique we will learn is a food delivery system called swallow food: dough-like starches and grains cooked into pastes for the eater to craft into scoops then swallow without chewing once the scoop loses its composition. From West Africa comes fufu, made from cassava, plantain or yam. From East Africa, ugali, a cornmeal porridge. From Ethiopia, injera, a spongy sour flatbread the meal and condiments are served on for the eater to tear off and collect the contents.

The lecture ends and Chef Andrea passes out today’s recipes: Lamb Tagine with Green Olives and Preserved Lemon; Chicken in Curried Groundnut [read: peanut] Sauce; Sukuma Wiki [Braised Collard Greens]; Red Lentil and Okra in Spicy Tomato Sauce. She breaks the class into teams, which excitedly break the recipe into tasks per person. They suit up into aprons if they weren’t already wearing one, pin hair back and tuck it into chef’s hats, withdraw knife bags from backpacks, and vacate the dining room.

I embed with Team Fufu in the sunny prep room bridging the dining room with the dish pit as two male students sanitize the floor and tape down rectangles of butcher paper for a food-safe surface on which to grate the coconut using the mbuzi. Three female students ranging from 22-62, the overall spread for the class, grab garish colored cutting boards and set them on the high wooden prep tables in the center of the room, unzipping or unclasping their knife bags, rolling out their contents and selecting what they need. Each cutting board carries the memory of the students before them, a crosshatching of a thousand cuts.

The oldest Team Fufu member, Doanh, boils plantain meal on the small induction stove on the table. The youngest, Aneliz, breaks down the African yam, much more fibrous than our orange Thanksgiving variety, skin peeling off in hairy flakes. The middle oldest, Lena, does the same with the cassava, then blends the chunks into a roaring gray soup, patting the mixture down with a plunger.

“Think that’s smooth enough?” she asks Chef Andrea, who circles stations to provide guidance when prompted.

This space, known fondly internally as the Green Tile Room, and to Pino Alto patrons for years as simply their favorite dining room, was annexed during Covid when the state required more distance between lab students. Diners mourned its loss, but it was a boon to the program.

The Pino Alto restaurant was an expansion born out of similar disaster times: the ’89 Loma Prieta earthquake.

The historic Sesnon House, recently retired Chef Instructor and former Program Director Eric Carter told me, was “red tagged to be torn down.”

“Kathy Niven, an instructor at that time, lobbied to get the Sesnon House taken over for the culinary program,” he said. Before that, CAHM crammed into the cafeteria kitchen, calling its eight-table restaurant The Back Dining Room. “Kathy, Claire Biancalana, probably the president, and a variety of faculty, got FEMA approval to get the money for that. To get FEMA funds, it had to be designated as a learning program.” All these years later, he’s still “giddy” they landed such an expansive homebase.

In the main kitchen, a student with cotton candy curls sprouting from beneath her chef’s hat is painstakingly removing the pulp from preserved lemons for Team Tagine. She juliennes the rind into matchsticks before dicing and weighing (always a more accurate portioning than measurements, especially for international recipes), telling me they made these during “Greek Week,” the first week of class.

The lemons originally came from Chef Andrea’s Meyer tree back home.

“I brought in hundreds of lemons the second day of class,” she says, “and they all preserved a jar to take home and got instructions how to care for them.”

In this kitchen, everything is repurposable. Items made by one class can be utilized by another, provided they aren’t claimed by the restaurant. Poking around their open pantry, see spice blends like Moroccan ras al hanout, which Team Tagine uses to dry rub their lamb cubes; pastrami seasoning; piri piri (used in Portuguese and African dishes); some mysterious “smokey, salty, sweet rub.” Goods Chef Andrea has access to—like said Meyer lemons, or stumbles upon in market tours, or even lucks into, like the mitmita spice an Ethiopian cafe presented to her after she praised it during dinner—are allocated for student use.

She taps some of that crimson spice into my palm—African bird’s eye chili, cardamom, cloves—and does the same for herself. It’s a wintry flavor with shades of hickory bbq, leading to heat coating my throat that’s numbing and pleasant at first.

“I didn’t forewarn you. I hope you can tolerate spice.”

I can, but I was overzealous and shouldn’t have licked my whole palm.

Even human error or decay can be repurposed as a teachable moment. When a roasted bulgur and peanut snack from an African market over the hill spoils, Chef Andrea has a student, Adam, saute it to try and refresh it, a common rescue for nuts and seeds not at their freshest, but it can’t be saved. Capitalizing, she passes it around in a ramekin for students to experience so they might identify rancidity first by smell, then by taste.

“As chefs, you should know this,” she announces. “Rancidity is when oils, fats, lipids naturally in things like nuts and grains, degrade. It has a bitterness. An off smell. In your own kitchens you should smell things when you open them up to use them.”

The other teams amass their mise en place—French for one’s ingredients and equipment laid out before cooking. Herbs and spices are measured into tiny plastic cups, onions and garlic and veggies chopped and perfectly leveled in deli containers.

Before the teams fire their dishes and because pausing anything means corrupting their process, Chef Andrea summons everybody for a breakout lecture. Students set their knives down and follow her out the back door, past the herb garden, and to the front lot. There she has laid down a rectangular strip of butcher paper weighted with a metal bowl to demo how to split a coconut using two non-kitchen tools: a hammer and a screwdriver.

“All right, crowd around,” she says.

She places the screwdriver blade in the depression at the coconut base where it fell from the tree, the “nostrils,” and taps it firmly but lightly until there’s an audible crack. She turns it over and out gushes its sweet water into the bowl. When it finishes she applies the hammer harder along the fissure lines she created to break it open the rest of the way, the sound rebounding around the lot.

“This is when I get an email from IT [which neighbors Pino Alto]: ‘What the hell are you doing?’”

Peeling off beautiful snowy quarters, she says, “We’re going to take these pieces stuck to the hard rind and grind them on the mbuzi. It’s going to create nice fine shreds we’ll hydrate using boiling water, separating out all the oil and milk versus the coconut water. Many of you need coconut milk in your recipes. We can use the fresh stuff today.”

Walking back to the prep room, she informs me about the other classes in progress.

“50 ABC’s doing stocks and sauces right now, up at another kitchen. Lunch lab is our Beginning, and dinner lab is our Advanced.”

The mbuzi has been folded up into an X shape, on which Chef Andrea sits crosslegged and, reaching across her body, with two hands pushes a coconut quarter down the blade in slow, rhythmic motions, not dissimilar to scrubbing a washboard. She invites students up to try.

“Keep all your fingers attached,” she says.

Up they come, volunteer after volunteer, giggling as they try something new, highlighting the type of energy one needs for this class, or the CAHM program in totality.

“Many of our students are aspiring chefs,” one student leans in and tells me, “and some are…if they boil water, it’s a victory.”

This gung ho spark will carry you farther than skills alone.

The tallest students have it hardest. Their legs extend so far from the machine, reaching across the body is more of a strain. Finally, compact Doanh shows everyone how it’s done, getting the most yield. Turns out she used a similar machine growing up in Vietnam, humanizing today’s lecture on how cultural information was seeded through conquest and trade.

Smaller graters, she informs us, they’d make out of bottle caps attached to a piece of wood.

“I really appreciate that share,” Chef Andrea says. “I’ve not seen that in my travels.”

Leslie from Team Tagine catalogues her fellow students’ attempts on her cell camera, and I marvel how much better her composition is than my own.

Chef Andrea tells me: “She got involved as an internship project helping us develop our photography bank with food and restaurant pictures.”

Leslie proudly gives me a slideshow, including of her final project for her Garde Manger class: tuna tartare in wonton tartlets. She attends Cabrillo on a workers’ comp voucher so she might open a restaurant with her husband in her home country of the Philippines, where such an undertaking is cheaper. In the meantime, he tells her what each dish is missing during her R&D phases, and his critiques can be unsparing.

Much harsher than Chef Andrea’s?

She laughs. “Yeah. Chef Andrea, Chef Jeremy [MacVeigh], Chef Anne [Baldzikowski], they encourage us to actually do what we love.”

Chef Eric, who misses the kitchen after teaching for 30 years, misses these daily interactions about students’ “aspirations” most of all. He sees a connection between instructors and students at Cabrillo across all disciplines, but in culinary arts there is an intimacy due to saturation: “I was teaching the advanced class and they were with me 20 hours a week.”

No one stays gone, according to Chef Andrea. Pino Alto is a hearth many return to—students to see their mentors, instructors to see their coworkers, everyone now colleagues convening in the dining room.

In a way, she never left. Like Instructional Coordinator Chef Wes Adams, she is a graduate of the CAHM program.

Team Tagine is ready to sear their lamb before covering it with the ceramic hood, and she checks to see if they know what color they’re seeking before they take it off the heat.Team Groundnuts’ hands are rusted with curry and chicken juice. In the printed recipe are helpful lecture snippets, making you contemplate when adding that tbsp of curry powder just how powerful the Indian/British influence was in East Africa. They read the directions aloud so they don’t miss anything. Each time they touch the page, it leaves a goldenrod fingerprint.

Deirdre refreshes the injera, like stone-colored ventilated coral, gently laying it out in a sheet pan and placing it in the hot box, a warming oven.A deep back of house résumé in Pennsylvania restaurants, she exemplifies how students can bring real-world industry experience to the program, feeling compelled in a lecture a few weeks ago to voice her concerns with the concept of “suggestive service.”

“Trying to get you to spend more money,” she says, “the server communicates in a way that makes it seem like it’s included, they’re just taking care of you, and then it’s on your bill later.” The covenant has been broken.

Instead, service is actually an investment. Fleece the customer on their first visit and you may get a short-term gain, but they’ll never return. But if you make them feel taken care of, “even if they didn’t spend the most money that day, they’ll come back.”

This also concerns managerial decisions. A restaurant that seems generous with dip but has waitstaff communicate “the chef recommends” an extra order of flatbread, then that extra should probably be provided outright.

“If it’s a $16 starter, but to actually enjoy it it’s a $21 starter, it isn’t genuine,” she says.

These are the issues the students at Pino Alto grapple with as they’re tasked with understanding every aspect of the restaurant, down to menu printing. The station wheel rotates each week, uprooting someone from where they’re comfortable to where they’re a newborn babe. They absorb feedback from every source possible.

“Whether the instructor said it or another student or a customer, by the end of the class it seems like everybody’s learned what they needed.” Moreover, being in the program “refines how I talk to people and how I teach things, and that’s a whole lesson itself.”

Lessons in Pino Alto also come in the form of comment cards, presented to patrons at their catering functions after meal service, or in the dining room with the bill. These request reflections on Food, Service, and an Other section for spillover, and factor into each student’s grade. Chef Andrea lets me flip through a stack from a brunch event. They vary in helpfulness depending on penmanship and pet peeves—as on Yelp, you can just tell when someone complains about the same thing everywhere.

One constructive Service review that actually sounds implementable: “Was a bit sporadic, and hard to understand what was self-serve and what we should wait for from our server.”

If ours was a meal for the public, the kitchen would have someone on expo, a position responsible for the timing of order tickets, and stove use would be prioritized accordingly. But since everyone is trying to complete their dishes simultaneously, there is an incredible pile-up there, seven people where there should be three, trying to claim a burner for their team.

Sometimes, your non-industry experience prepares you for the kitchen, as with retired CHP officer Sam, who skipped the melee by grabbing an induction burner early and setting up a satellite stove at a prep sink to cook his lentil dish.

“He had that forethought,” Chef Andrea says approvingly. “That’s the kind of leader we need in the kitchen. He just walks through a space and knows what to do as an adult learner, even though a lot of students in their first or second semester are still very nervous.”

I mention how the design of the original kitchen hierarchy was inspired by the French military, so having a former CHP is…

She finishes my thought.

“Very apropos.”

I follow her to check on Team Fufu. There’s a high likelihood these chefs have never made anything like this, and she’s seeking a specific glutinous consistency. Unfortunately, the yam version got so thick that the stirrer couldn’t manipulate enough of the layers to keep some from burning on the bottom. She likes the texture, though.

“We’ll call it ‘smoked,’” she says with a wink.

Dominic is patiently pouring coconut water over its flesh perching in a fine-mesh strainer.

“It’s like watching water boil?” Chef Andrea says. “Watching coconut milk…coconut?”

“Faster than watching paint dry,” he says.

Teams bring in their completed dishes. “This is definitely the hardest part of class,” one student says after setting theirs down. “The 10 minutes before you get to eat.”

Four hours have passed since the lecture began.

Instead of grace, Chef Andrea starts the meal with a disclaimer, that due to limited African markets locally, the ingredients in our feast will not be easily procured. She names businesses over the hill that will be the students’ best bet.

“What was one of the indigenous ingredients you saw on the slides today?”

“Watermelon,” several murmur.

“Watermelon,” she repeats. “This is the hull of the seed, called egusi. Adam and Dominic tossed it up with some salt and berbere.”

Each team presents their dishes with some instructions on proper consumption, including a challenge that we eat with our right hand only, as most Africans do, then with a bon appétit from Chef Andrea we serve up and dig in, save one student fasting for Ramadan who fills a to-go container.

Dishes dolloped, my injera “plate” looks like a paint palette, each shade a different region. I enjoy the lamb the most, the broth piquant with lemon and briny green olives. The fufu is too ungainly to enjoy on my first try, all three types refusing to indent to allow me to scoop, and the yam one fuses to my fingers, so I stick to the familiar injera as my mechanism of choice.

The classroom becomes a dining room again as each student departs, hauling their backpacks out with them. The last to leave is Susie, wearing an apron with a full skeleton X-ray, pie tins rattling in her tote bag, off to make key lime pie in the “bake shops,” the baking-only kitchens on campus.

Next week, they travel to the Caribbean, but I get off on this leg of the tour. Everyone is leaving, but as Chef Andrea made clear, they’ll be back.

To dine at Pino Alto and experience the ingenuity and accomplishments of students like these, make sure to call 831-479-6524 before arriving—the restaurant closes during student breaks and for private parties. To register for classes, visit cabrillo.edu/culinary-arts-hospitality-management/

Editor’s note: Spelling corrections on the names of two students and a class made on April 23.