Students, staff and community members at the Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech), in Melbourne, won’t need a passport to experience the flavors of the world—they can just attend one of the eight International Dining Series events put on by Campus Dining Services throughout the academic year.
“We’re about 30% international [students] here, so the administration of the university last year started a push to celebrate the international quality that we have on campus,” explains Tom Stewart, dining director. “Every department was given the goal of internationalization, so our goal was to create this series of international dining events and try to get the community interested in coming to the dining hall and seeing the international [make-up] that we have here.”
When determining which countries to highlight in the series, Stewart and his team looked to student population base. With large numbers of Middle Eastern, Chinese, Indian and Caribbean students, those were the regions they targeted.
“We try to feature those areas first and then work in the rest of the world,” Stewart says. “We want to have it tied to the students, so the students are driving the foods that we choose. We’re taking the population that we have and gearing the events towards [them].”
The first event of the series was held in August at the campus’s Panther Dining Hall. It focused on the flavors of the Caribbean.
“The Caribbean Student Association got involved and we had music for the evening, we had dancing,” Stewart says. “The Caribbean students had a table in the lobby with artifacts, a steel drum and some traditional dress, [and they] greeted people as they came in. We typically serve about between 900 and 1,000 students for dinner; that evening we had a little over 1,500, so it was very successful as far as participation from the community goes.”
With the help of some willing faculty and staff, September’s event spotlighted the flavors of the Middle East through an extensive menu of items like fattoush, pita bread salad with romaine, cucumber, tomato and lemon dressing; kibbeh, patties of ground beef, bulgur, onions, mint and cumin; bhuna gosht, goat simmered in garlic, ginger, chili and cumin; and kenafeh, mildly sweet pastry with shredded filo, heavy cream custard, chopped pistachio and rose water. “[For] this particular Middle Eastern dinner, we had a couple faculty members from [the Middle East who] offered some help and some taste testing.” Stewart credited Chef de Cuisine Jon Skoviera with handling “a lot of development for this particular dinner.”
Many of the items found to be popular at the international events will also be added to the department’s arsenal of recipes. “One of the goals that we had is that we’ll take the best things that we learned from these [events] and we’ll work them into our regular menu,” Stewart says.
The year’s remaining events will include the flavors of central Africa, India, the Mediterranean, South America, China, Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.