Can a teaching restaurant become a major revenue driver for an educational institution? It’s a question that Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) is considering as it continues an ongoing reimagining of its Great Lakes Culinary Institute (GLCI). The college recently entered a six-month contract with a consultant who will analyze the GLCI program – specifically Lobdell’s, GLCI’s Hagerty Center-based teaching restaurant – to identify new revenue streams that NMC could derive from Lobdell’s and the prime campus real estate it occupies.

Lobdell’s opens for the spring 2023 season today (Wednesday), with plans to offer lunch two days a week throughout the semester. Also on the schedule are a quartet of tapa-style lunches and dinners, scheduled for four Thursdays throughout the semester. Demand was high for those engagements: Reservations for Lobdell’s spring 2023 events opened on January 23 and many meals and events sold out “in a matter of hours,” according to NMC Communications Director Cari Noga.

It’s partially because of that demand that NMC is looking into new potential space utilization strategies for the teaching restaurant. In 2021 and 2022, the college went through an 18-month process to assess the future of GLCI. Despite the culinary program’s status as a signature offering of the college, it was also a major money loser for NMC – particularly as enrollment levels dipped throughout the 2010s. NMC President Nick Nissley told The Ticker last fall that GLCI’s enrollment had dropped from over 200 students in 2014 to 80 in 2022, with program levels falling by half in that same time period. The decline of the program prompted NMC leadership to ask whether the program had a future – and if so, if it could be reimagined to become more financially sustainable.

Those conversations led to multiple changes within GLCI, including a shift away from traditional college semester schedules toward shorter, more accessible eight-week terms. According to GLCI Director Les Eckert, the program shifts have quickly yielded positive results. “Fall of 2022, we finally saw our first enrollment that was larger than it was pre-COVID,” she says. “So that’s a huge deal for us. We’ve been working really hard on our recruitment initiatives – asking, ‘Where are we recruiting?’ ‘How are we recruiting?’ ‘How far out into the state and out of state are we recruiting?’ ‘What types of scholarships are we offering?’ Those conversations have played a big part in this past year, with our numbers increasing.”

One casualty of the reimagining process – along with declining enrollments and the disruption of COVID-19 – was a slight de-emphasis of Lobdell’s as a core part of the GLCI program. “You always need a constant movement of students through the program in order to get to the restaurant class, which is the last culinary course of the program,” Eckert explains. COVID-19 disrupted that flow, bringing “a drastic decrease in enrollment” that threatened the future of Lobdell’s. “That disruption in enrollment obviously trickles through every semester, and then hits the restaurant. And when you don't have enough students to run the restaurant class, the effect is not be able to offer it at all.”

As part of the GLCI reimagining, NMC leaders challenged Eckert and her team to make the restaurant class more affordable to students. “It used to be a 24-hour course offered in four days, and that can be expensive,” Eckert tells The Ticker. “So, to reduce the costs, we moved that course from 24 hours to 16 hours. And while that's a great savings to the students, we knew we were losing a service day [at Lobdell’s] which meant we would be losing revenue. And at the same time, students still needed exposure to serving the public and working under pressure in the kitchen and in the dining room.”

All those dominoes falling have led to a new project at NMC: reimagining Lobdell’s for the future. In some ways, those efforts are already been underway: In the past year, Eckert says GLCI has added several new courses to the first and second years of the culinary program to give students other service-oriented learning opportunities at Lobdell’s. Last semester, for instance, GLCI added six new public evening offerings to its programming slate, including three Friday evening “charcuterie and cocktails” happy hour events.

Now, NMC is looking for other new revenue streams. Some of those could involve learning opportunities for students, but Eckert says the bigger goals at the moment are bringing in more money to subsidize the (expensive) GLCI program and making better use of the Lobdell’s space. “We have this beautiful dining room with great location and great views, but it’s dark and empty quite a bit of the time when we’re not using it for academic purposes,” she explains. “So now, the college is bringing on a consultant to answer the question of, ‘Well, when that space isn’t being used for academic purposes, how can the college still generate revenue and use that space?’”

The consultant in question is Joel Heberlein, who not only assisted with GLCI’s 18-month reimagining process, but is also the former general manager of Michigan State University’s Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center and the former executive director of the Spartan Hospitality Group. (Heberlein’s six-month contract, Noga says, is fully donor-funded by a long-time supporter of the GLCI.)

“Basically, we want to know if there are other things we should be doing [with the Lobdell’s space],” says Jason Slade, NMC’s vice president for strategic initiatives and Heberlein’s main point of contact for the project. Already, the college has some ideas on that front: For example, one concept Heberlein will be analyzing is the prospect for more of what Slade calls “immersion programs” at Lobdell’s. In the fall, GLCI debuted a trio of master classes “aimed at serious home chefs and workforce chefs looking for professional development.” Those classes were open to the public – not just to GLCI students – and taught everything from sourdough breadmaking to yule log preparation. “We’d like to know: Does the consultant see some opportunities to scale up [those master classes]?” Slade says.

More broadly, though, Slade is hopeful that Heberlein will come up with some ideas for Lobdell’s that no one at NMC or GLCI has thought of yet. “The goal is to define some ideas that have real opportunity, roll them out, run them, prove that they work, and then integrate them into the program as a whole,” Slade says. “We're excited to see what comes of this. I think this project is unique in terms of finding a different take on supporting a program, and being able to have a consultant come in that has experience in culinary and higher ed and show us some places where we could really expand our reach, that's going to be very valuable.”