Their customers, fellow students, have high expectations and the Lab is usually fully booked weeks in advance. The students have to manage everything, from menu design to choosing the wine list, choice of décor, tableware and even napkins, of which there are 20 colors to pick from. Though it’s not open to the public, the Lab is designed to be as close to a commercial restaurant environment as possible. At the end of the first week the roles are swapped, giving everybody a chance to try the two sides of restaurant life. They are divided in half, with one group placed in the kitchen and the other on service. Everyone can benefit from knowing what it takes to set up a professional F&B offering from scratch.”Įach two weeks a new cohort of 10 students enters the Lab. This course is ideal for them, but it’s equally great for all our students. “ Around a third of our alumni become entrepreneurs in hospitality many of them operating their own restaurants. “The idea for Restaurant Lab is to immerse our first semester students in the world of entrepreneurship,” explains Service Instructor Ebru Macarrao. Sounds impossible? At Les Roches it happens every two weeks during term time. In that short time your menus must be set, your recipes created, your ingredients bought, your kitchen prepared for action and your service team ready to make your concept come alive at the table.

Now imagine you have just two days to get from a blank sheet of paper to opening your doors to the first wave of hungry diners.

If you could create your own pop-up restaurant concept, what would you choose? Steak House? Italian? Vegetarian? And how would you theme it?

Download the lab bistro