Monday August 25 watch Par Excellence serve Houston TV personality Debra Duncan on her morning magazine television show, Good Day Houston on Channel 11! Par Ex will be serving food from Houston’s best restaurants, as part of a series of the best of Houston, and serving service that is Par Excellence!Tune in at 9am on Channel 11 or online! www.khou.com/greatday
This week our petities practiced their garde’manger skills. Garde’manger, pronounced gard-mon-j, is the art of presenting food. Par Excellence members don’t cook for our guests, but many times we are asked to help set up buffets, plate dinners, or platers. This is where we are able to make our mark and add an extra piece of flare to impress our guests.Our training directors, Jamie and Juliet, took a hands on approach and got everyone into the action. They also discussed proper guidelines for balancing a plate or platter, taking into consideration: color, shape, texture, flavor, and portion size.
Each semester we accept a handful of students to join Par Excellence and each semester our Training and Assistant Training Director take time out of their week to share with our Petites all the skills necessary to deliver service that is par excellence. Its a huge commitment, not only for Jamie and Juliet, our Training and Assistant Training Directors, but also for the Petites. Training lasts about two months, and consists of both lecture and hands on components. Also, each meeting there is a quiz and every Petite must pass our final exam on their first try to be a full fledged member.
Our Petites are about half way though their training (already completing bar training, service, Par Ex standards, and other subjects). This week was wine training! We where lucky enough to have Kevin Simon as our guest to give us a thorough demonstration of wine service standards according to the Court of Master Sommeliers. In addition to these service standards of pouring and presenting, we also roll played who would be served first in a variety of different scenarios. To cap it all off we practiced uncorking wine and champagne with out making a sound.
Tuesday Par Ex’s marketing directors exhibited internal marketing at its best with a bowling social! It was a lot of fun and we had a blast. It was one of the first times we saw Diana since she had her new baby boy and the first time some of the older members had met some of our new petites.
It may just look like an excuse for us to bowl, but events like these really contribute to the spirit of Par Excellence. No where else will you find such a close nit group of servers or students and it is because we are so close to each other. To all our new members and baby Caleb, welcome to the family!
Par Excellence is an honors student organization dedicated to promoting the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management and its members through the actual experience of managing and operating of a first-class hospitality staffing business. In a nut shell, we promote our college by staffing functions in the Houston area, and doing our job par excellence. All the money we raise goes to scholarships for our members and other superb students at the Hilton College. Besides a scholarship we also earn experience through working a variety of different functions and by learning how to run a small business. Running Par Excellence requires an extensive executive staff from our event coordinators, trainers, marketing directors, and more.
The purpose of this blog is to show our loyal clients, potential clients, and potential new members what else is going on at Par Excellence. From booking a function, training our new members, internal marketing (retraining, socials, and etc.!), there is a lot more to Par Excellence than you have probably realized. We also have a rich history, 25 years in the making, that we would love to share.
We’ve also worked a lot of parties, from birthdays to dog birthdays or weddings to divorce parties. So we will also go over some great tips we have learned over the many years of working functions.
Anyway, we just wanted to give sort of an introduction. We hope that this will be a lot of fun!