Florida Tech Presents Cuisines of the World
Public Invited to International Dining Series
MELBOURNE, FLA. — Let your plate be your passport and your appetite your tour guide as Florida Institute of Technology begins a culinary trip around the world Thursday with the start of Campus Dining Service’s innovative International Dining Series.
With menus from the Caribbean to Central Africa, from the Middle East to Southern Asia, Florida Tech Dining Director Tom Stewart and Chef de Cuisine Jon Skoviera invite the general public to join the university community in dining on dishes as diverse and interesting as the university’s own population, which is home to students from 112 countries.
In fact, some of those students ensured that the items presented at the once-a-month dining series are accurate reflections of what they would eat in their homelands. The cod fritters on the Caribbean menu? The Nigerian Scotch eggs on the Central African menu? They were first sampled by students from those areas.
“This is pretty close,” said Jennifer Agbonlahor, a senior from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, as she ate one of those Scotch eggs during a student tasting session in the kitchens of Panther Dining Hall. “I’m really impressed.”
Stewart said he, Skoviera and their team worked to ensure they will be serving the real deal meals. “This is authentic cuisine, not an Americanized version,” he said.
The Scotch eggs – about 1,000 of them – will be a part of the Central Africa dinner program on Oct. 22. Up next, however, is the Sept. 18 menu of foods from the Middle East, featuring red lentil soup with mint, lamb kofta in tomator curry sauce, baked eggplant, pomegranate chicken and more.
“Florida Tech is such a wonderfully diverse place that we thought it would be fun and informative to reflect some of that diversity in the meals we provide at Panther Dining Hall,” Stewart said. “That we can introduce some of these cuisines to the Space Coast community at large makes this even better.”
There will be educational materials posted in the dining hall during the monthly International Dining Series dinners. Entertainment reflecting that night’s geographic origins will be offered at some meals, as well.
Here’s the full schedule for the dining series:
- Thursday, September 18 Middle East
- Wednesday, October 22 Central Africa
- Thursday, November 13 India/Southern Asia
- Thursday, January 15 Mediterranean
- Thursday, February 19 Chinese
- Thursday, March 19 South America
- Thursday, April 23 Korea, Thailand, Vietnam
The dinners are $12 per person and will be served from 5-8:30 p.m. at Panther Dining Hall, 3113 Panther Place, just south of the Clemente Center on the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne. Visitor parking is free on the first floor of the parking garage behind the dining hall.
Click here for a campus map. The dining hall is building No.41; the parking garage is No. 40.
For more information, call 321-674-8040 or visit Florida Tech’s dining site at http://www.fit.edu/food/.
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