Upper Westside Kindergartners open popup Ooh La La Cafe for two days at PS87.

Photo: City Harvest

        Restaurant openings can be organized mayhem, and the breakfast rush at Ooh La La Café’s debut was no different. The honey-hued room buzzed as servers flitted from table to table and then sprinted back to the kitchen. Servings of French toast and crusty baguettes spread with strawberry butter arrived on heeling trays. Busers swooped in to refill water glasses. Our waiter, Elan, asked for the order: French toast, I said, and a blueberry muffin later. Elan dropped to the floor on hands and knees to jot down the request.

        “I’m in the weeds!” the hostess, Emilia, stopped by our table to proclaim. She grinned and skipped back to her post at the café’s entrance. This class of kindergarten students was feeling the heat of running a restaurant in its homeroom at PS 87 William T. Sherman elementary school.

 

        To reach this feverish performance day, teacher Robyn Ulzheimer’s kindergarten charges spent the fall term studying apples and learning business skills by running an apple stand in their homeroom. It was small potatoes in comparison to the prep work for Ooh La La Cafe. They began by sizing up the competition, scouting the Upper West Side blocks around PS87 collecting menus, checking out prices, discussing different kinds of cuisines and learning restaurant lingo. Robyn led field trips to temples of grease (Shake Shack) and green marketry (Telepan), and the class got to question the staff from back to front of the house. Disney’s Ratatouille was carefully studied, and family members in “the industry” came in to speak. The budding gourmands thrilled to eat a meal cooked by the chef Bill Telepan, a school parent, and marveled at the concept of the walkin refrigerator. They quickly picked up line-cook lingo like “eighty-six” and “pin a rose on it.”

       Both parents and children are excited by the process of teaching math, reading and social skills through food, which was introduced to PS 87 by Ms. Ulzheimer three years ago. It makes sense in this food-centric city. Typically New York youngsters get a taste of dining out when still in the high chair, and would-be restaurant critics hit the blogosphere pre-puberty.

        “There’s real life in everything they learn here,” said Alex Long, Robyn’s former teaching assistant who returns each year to cook the one menu constant: French toast, “made with love and the craziness of five-year-olds,” according to Alex (Only adults are permitted to wield knives and work hot stoves). I watch a kindergarten cook spatula two pieces of French toast onto a plate after a classmate requests the order “on the fly!” Activities like plating food or taking orders exercise a combination of basic skills like counting, writing and reading to perform, as well as the real-world smarts. Nothing teaches the importance of cooperation and patience like working in the service industry.

       “My goal for kindergartners in general is understanding dependency and their relationship with others,” Ms. Ulzheimer said. “In a restaurant, if you don’t do your job, it effects everyone else. And they learn independence as well - they have their own role and place.”

       They learn community-building too.  The money collected in the register – at 75 cents per dish – goes to City Harvest, the New York City organization that collects surplus and unwanted food and distributes it to soup kitchens and community feeding programs. Ooh La La customers are asked to pay with small bills, but the kids get to write a monster outsize check to present to the charity.

       “K104, set the tables! Our next customers are coming!” Ms. Ulzheimer cries as the next seating of the morning looms. “Deep breaths, in and out. Smell the flowers. Blow out the candles.” she says to calm the children as they scurry to clear the first round of plates.  My second course blueberry muffin has arrived.

       “Bon Appetit,” says a grinning server.  “You may eat.”

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