Marriott Meals at the Marriott Center

In spring of 2007, the Marriott Center for Hospitality Management opened for its first active semester. After 18 months under construction, the 11th floor of the University Campus Center had been reinvented into a 200- seat Marriott dining facility named in honor of J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott. The $6.3 million facility encompasses two state-of-the-art commercial production and demonstration kitchen-classrooms. Each week, students alternate roles within the “classroom” participating in every aspect of the restaurant business. Students attend one lecture each week that pulls together information from all core hospitality classes. Students learn high-quality standards of guest service, staffing, ordering and receiving, food costs and accounting, and overall operations techniques to running a full service restaurant. Students rotate through different positions teaching them hands on about sanitary codes, food preparation techniques, and proper serving temperatures. 

Each week the students change roles within the establishment from dishwasher, to food prep, to serving, to actually managing the operation. Marriott Meals gives HTM students at UMass a competitive advantage within this experiential learning class. This restaurant operations course allows students to make real life mistakes and correct those mistakes in a professional, hospitable manner. This class is not a simulation and is open to the public during meal hours. Not only is this class teaching the future leaders of hospitality about food preparation and operations, but how to think as a leader on their feet in the moment. This class is about real students becoming real leaders to the public on our very own campus.