Hilton College’s 1,920-square-foot Sysco Student Kitchen made its official debut during a special ribbon-cutting and donor recognition open house held March 19, 2019. This was the first major renovation to our instructional kitchen lab since it opened its doors in 1989. The “extreme makeover” began late in 2018. The entire space was completely gutted and rebuilt from the ground up.

Featuring four state-of-the-art cooking stations to give it the functionality of an exhibition kitchen, this $1.3 million project includes top-of-the line commercial appliances. Monitors above each area allow students to receive lectures simultaneously – and remotely – from anywhere in the world. Overhead cameras can also broadcast live events from the kitchen to multiple venues, including our Hilton hotel’s ballrooms. This technology significantly increases teaching capacity and allows our instructors to broadcast more demonstrations to any number of places concurrently for any variety of special events, including cooking demonstrations from guest chefs.

In collaboration with Dr. Nancy Graves, The Worrell Design Group and BRAVE/Architecture, our new student kitchen was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Fred and Mabel R. Parks Foundation, the University of Houston’s Maintenance Project Evaluation Committee and Sysco.