Parent’s Day Gala Dinner 2012

  

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