When people face the same thing every day, it gets boring. So it makes sense that people don’t want to eat the same food every day. As far as pubs or restaurants go, seeing the same style over and over again is boring as well.
Here at Camosun College, the Dunlop House Pub creates a new style with its combination of education, entertainment, and food. The pub, located on Camosun’s Lansdowne campus, is managed by first-year Hospitality Management students.
One of those students is Erin MacNeil; she says the look of the pub varies as several student groups take turns running it, and they all have a different theme to organize their night around.
“Each group will do different games depending on the theme of the pub night,” she says. “What we’ve had so far is that there’s been some pin the tail on the donkey, some trivia questions; we’ve decorated the house completely to go with our theme, and our menu is also based off of the theme of our pub night.”
Camosun Hospitality and Tourism Management chair Carl Everitt says that students manage the pub as a part of studying hospitality management.
“The relationship that we have here at the house is that we run a fine dining restaurant here on Wednesday evenings, so the students actually run the restaurants as part of the management class,” he says. “We are very focused on applied learning; applied learning is part of our teaching philosophy here in this program. So the students run a restaurant; they also run a student club night on Thursday evenings as well.”
The Dunlop House has sporadic hours, which Everitt says is a result of when students are able to run the pub.
“It doesn’t open every day because it’s part of a class,” says Everitt. “It’s a scheduled class that runs the Dunlop House restaurant. It’s not just, you know, students come by and run it as a work experience; it’s actually part of a credit course that they take. And Wednesdays is the day of that class, so that’s why we only open one day per week.”
Everitt says that anyone can attend the pub; it’s not just limited to students of Camosun. (He also says that money raised from the pub goes back into the program.)
“It’s mainly students from the campus,” he says. “So students from around the Landsowne campus, and also faculty, and friends and family, come to visit the pub as well.”
Everitt says that the pub is unique, and so is the building that it’s housed in.
“I think it’s the fact that we’re able to deliver applied learning here in the house,” says Everitt. “We’re a very self-contained building. We have the facilities here to be able to deliver a full professional restaurant. All the faculty and staff for this department are based here as well. It’s a very unique building. It has a lot of good memories for many students. The program has been operating here for 43 years.”
The Dunlop House restaurant is open on some Wednesdays from 5:30 pm to 7 pm from October to April; the pub is open some Thursdays from 4 to 6 from October to December. See camosun.ca/learn/programs/hospitality-management/dunlop-house.html for a list of the dates.