With Love Restaurant, now an extension of Onondaga Community College, reopened on Tuesday with a new menu. The business selects an entrepreneur for its restaurant training program twice a year and features a new cuisine. For the next six months, the menu will feature Vietnamese cuisine inspired by Ngoc Huynh, the newest entrepreneur-in-residence.

Huynh applied to the program because she wanted to share her family’s dishes as well as preserve the recipes. But the process was nerve-racking, she said, especially on opening day.

“The anticipation of whether customers will come and like the food made my heart race. It reminded me of the time I got the lead part in the school play,” she said. “All of us had butterflies in our stomachs. But the ending was phenomenal. The time, effort and mixed emotions were worth it.”

Now, the Vietnamese menu at With Love restaurant will be available until June 28.

With Love functions as both a full-service dining room as well as a teaching facility. OCC created the program to provide an education to students who have difficulty accessing college, said Gabrielle Reagan, its food service coordinator.

Reagan works at the front of the house and teaches students guest service, preparing them with “soft skills” like eye contact, conversation, taking initiative and more.

Onondaga Community owns With Love Restaurant and also offers students to college students cooking and customer service program. Aaron Kassman | Staff Photographer

“It’s all of the little things that maybe people don’t know yet,” she said. “We want to make sure we send them out there and the employer doesn’t have to ask them for things, it should just be expected.”

Not only does the restaurant train students in guest services and cooking, but they also choose one entrepreneur out of their applicants to be a “mock owner” of the restaurant. They learn how to build their own menu and manage employees — building skills they would need to run their own restaurant, said Joseph Bilecki, the program director.

The selected entrepreneur is someone who is looking to open a restaurant of their own, Bilecki said, and the program teaches them the skills needed to succeed. They are taught menu development, budgeting, guest relations, equipment operation, bookkeeping and more.

“We give them a safe space to make mistakes,” he said. “They’re mistakes that if somebody makes when opening their first restaurant, (it) could cost them hundreds or thousands of dollars.”

But at With Love, their mistakes aren’t costly. Bilecki said the entrepreneurs are given the staff’s full support, from the minute they join the program and beyond. After the six-month program, they help the entrepreneurs find potential spaces for their own restaurants.

“I want to make this more accessible to the community,” Reagan said. “Not only to get more people in here to eat, but also to get an understanding of what this restaurant is and why it’s so unique.”

The money made at With Love goes back into the students’ tuition and the featured cuisines are inspired by the entrepreneurs’ backgrounds, Bilecki said. The restaurant’s international cuisine is its hallmark, with previous menus coming from places such as Pakistan, Myanmar and Georgia.

With Love Vietnam’s new menu includes popular dishes from Ngoc Huynh’s family recipes, including bún mắm, a seafood noodle soup. Aaron Kassman | Staff Photographer

In addition to a carefully constructed and authentic menu, customers also have the opportunity to learn about the dishes, with the entrepreneurs going table-to-table and explaining their menu, something Bilecki said is not typical at most restaurants.

Huynh worked for My Lucky Tummy in the past, when it was owned by Adam Sudmann. She said she has enjoyed cuisines from past entrepreneurs from the restaurant’s program.

So far, Huynh said the program has taught her the importance of measurements in recipes. She never measured anything while cooking until the restaurant forced her to write down her recipes to help create the menu.

The items on the menu, she said, are popular dishes from her mother’s hometown of Tra Vinh, Vietnam, and her favorite dish to make is Bún mắm, a seafood soup with fermented fish and noodles.

Bilecki said that the soup was not a food he would normally try because it’s made with fermented fish, but once he did, he found it delicious.

“Not only would I pay money for this, but I would go out of my way for this,” he said.

Published on January 23, 2019 at 8:56 pm

Contact Brooke: bnkato@syr.edu