Parent’s Day Gala Dinner 2012
“Una
Noche Fantastico Latino Americano”
“Welcome to the
Parent’s Day!” that words were mostly heard for 5 days, from 13-17 July 2012. We, the students of Trisakti Institute of Tourism just held an event for our
parents as a small token of all they have given to us, their unconditional love, their encouragement, their knowledge and their financial assistance in allowing us to pursue a rewarding career in the hospitality industry in the near future.
The main point of this event is to
reconcile the broken relationship and to strengthen the bond between parents
and children. 180 guests a day, 4 course menu at IDR250,000 per guest. Our the team planned all
from scratch until we could serve the best of us at this event. And I had the good fortune of playing a part in the kitchen team of this event.
Our General
Manager, Bryan Octavianus, took Latin America as our event’s theme. For us the
kitchen team, that theme is kind of interesting yet challenging. 7 months is
the time limit for us to look for the best suppliers, sponsorships, and creating the
menu! While we also still need to do our daily routine classes.
Our team comprises of 15
staff: Executive Chef, Sous Chef, CDP appetizer, CDP soup, CDP Main Course,
Demi Chef for each section, and Commi for each section. We face many problems
on our way to success.
We didn’t trust each other as a team, we didn’t support each other,
and that problems drove us down. Thanks God, we had advisors that could help us
solve our internal problems. Mr.Bondan Pambudi, Rendy Kongs, Johardi, our
lecturers, our seniors that had been chosen as our advisors. Since we are
still unprofessional Chef nor Cook, literally, we need a lot of advice from them to
help us. Through the
course, we learned to support and to trust each other, and collectively worked
as a team.
A month to “D” day,
we had finally fixed
our menu! We had Tropicana Empanadas for our appetizer
Green Peas Soup; Stuffed Tex-mex Chicken for our Main Course; and Poppy Seed Cake Mango
Mousse as the dessert. However,
we were short on funds to sustain the event, and that was a big headache for
us. We were responsible for this event, and we had to persevere to make it
work.
By faith, we
continued to hold our event to fulfill our passion of giving our parents something,
that they will keep in memory forever. Day 1 went quite well but still
not good enough, our food tasted good, but we didn’t get the speed. Day 2
was much better, food tasted good, speed
was good but, we had to loose our Sous Chef, Miki who had to fly to Bali the
next morning for an internship. We lost one of our valuable staff, we’re lost some of
our power.
Day 3 was like a “hell”
day, everything looked good until the event started. We forgot to recheck the food, so we
found the mashed potato spoilt, and that was frustrating, our
service began to slow down, and was even worse than our first day. We felt we let down the
parents who came at that day (my parents came that day too). We were visibly
upset, we cried because we failed to run this job smoothly.
But, our teammates from other department cheered us on and encouraged us to
move forward, and that lifted up our spirits to fight for the rest of the event.
Day 4, we were doing the best service, our food tasted very good (the guest
said), we caught up the speed, and we finished very good! Amazingly good, in fact.
Yay! We continued preparing some stuff till late night that day, and we enjoyed working together as a team, we
sang, we dance, we shared jokes while prepping for tomorrow’s
service.
Day 5, the last day
of our events, 3 VVIP tables, from representatives of Education Ministries,
representatives of the institute, sponsors, lecturers, and 15 others VIP
tables of our parents! Heartbeats were pumping at exponential rate, we needed to make
sure everything would go as smooth as silk.
And guess what? We had done it perfectly! We were super
happy! All our guests were
impressed with the services! From the front office staff,
cake shop products, the shows, the menu, the food, the waiters,
everything was just
perfect. And there’s another surprise, we had more
than enough money to pay our bills! What a relieving day it was!
That’s our 7-month long story of struggles and challenges, condensed
into an article. 5 days fighting in our own warzone, and a
moment of victory defeating and even defying our very own limits. We took great pride in our success, and our parents were
proud of our achievements. We will keep making them
proud. For me, it’s been a learning curve journey with the kitchen team, a concoction of happiness,
sadness, anger, everything I felt with this team just brought me closer to
them, I knew I had a new
family, a family that supports each other no matter what mistakes we made, but will fight together to reach
the light at the end of the tunnel. I felt blessed being a part of them, and I love my Kitchen team!
Patrese
Vito
Student @ Trisakti Institute of Tourism
Jakarta, Indonesia
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