Treetops goes international

By Benjamin Circelli
Senior Staff Writer
October 18, 2006

Treetops Café hosted its first world cuisine dinner Oct. 17.

Focusing on European cuisine, students were able to sample authentically prepared food such as Salad Nicoise, Gazpacho, Chicken Escarole Soup, Kielbasa and Sauerkraut, Herb Spatzle in Brown Butter, Toltott Kaposzta, Duck a l’orange, Beef Bourguignon, Riz Au Gras, Dutch cookies and black forest cake.

This event was the first of four dinners that will be serving various world cuisines.

The Treetops management staff and chefs met over the summer and brainstormed ideas for special events. They decided to incorporate a common theme that would tie each event together, and came up with the idea to celebrate world cuisine dinners.

While the European dinner was held first, Asian, Latin American and African cuisine will soon follow during the rest of the semester.

For each dinner, Treetops staff selected recipes that were most likely to be a success throughout the La Salle student body.

“We wanted to pick some dishes that students have heard of, but also some dishes that they may have never tried,” said Brian Kateusz, one of two head chefs responsible for cooking most of the world cuisine dinner.

These included classic French dishes such as Duck a l’orange and Beef Bourguignon. The chefs also wanted to incorporate a lot of tradition into each dish. For example, original style pizza, Neapolitan, was served, as well as the Margarita pizza, which was made especially for the queen.

Signs were placed in front of each dish, explaining the food’s history and how it is viewed in the United States.

“By cooking different traditional recipes from multiple countries in Europe, we hoped that students with a European heritage would eat something they haven’t had since childhood or something they always ate but never knew exactly what it was,” Kateusz said.

While the world cuisine dinners were created for the enjoyment of the students, the chefs also got to show off a little more of their cooking skills and have fun doing it.

The second head chef, Jean-Teko Cougblenou, who hails from Togo, West Africa, specializes in French cuisine.

“I chose the two dishes from France because I wanted to cook it the traditional way—the way it is served in that country,” Cougblenou said.

Senior Dara Mitchell was impressed by the Treetops event on Tuesday night.

“The dining experience is stepping its game up, and at the same time exposing people to other things,” she said.

Katie Chmieleski was also pleased with the dinner menu.

“It’s good that even the dining halls at La Salle focus on being multi-cultural and serve a diverse variety in Treetops, even if it’s just for one night,” she said.

circellib1@lasalle.edu