Hospitality students add special hands-on touch to annual UNLVINO
The 44th annual edition of UNLVINO is coming up next weekend, one of the city’s top wine-tasting events and a longstanding tradition that puts the “fun” in fundraising.
It’s easily one of the best-known charitable hospitality events on the Las Vegas calendar, but you might not know that much of the preparation for UNLVINO is done by the students who have reaped the benefits of the event’s decades of success.
In early March — inside a pristine kitchen classroom at Hospitality Hall, the new headquarters for UNLV’S William F. Harrah College of Hospitality — the 40 students enrolled in a class devoted to the planning and execution of UNLVINO welcomed faculty and friends for a pre-event menu tasting. Shrimp and red snapper ceviche, truffle and lobster mac and cheese balls and chicken and waffle skewers were among the shared dishes, tasty canapés that impressed guests in a collaborative quest to create the perfect snacks for the annual event.
Kegan Kraft was tasked with creating many of the tiny, pretty desserts: candied and caramel apples, crispy cookies and cream puffs with lemon filling. “You can actually taste the lemon and a lot of people are going to love that,” she said.
Kraft has volunteered to work UNLVINO for the past two years, but since she’s enrolled in the UNLVINO class — the culminating course for many hospitality students — she’s much more involved this year. She’s finishing an internship with the Hakkasan Group and planning a career in restaurant management. “I enjoy cooking but I don’t think I want to go that route, but I still want to be around it,” she said. “I’ve always thought about opening my own restaurant, but that’s way further down the line.”
When you bite into a candied apple at UNLVINO — a Hawthorne apple, so each partygoer has their own whole, mini-apple to enjoy — you’re enjoying Kraft’s handiwork.
“A lot of these dishes have to do with trends, things the students like or things they’ve seen,” said Mark Sandoval, the college’s executive chef and a veteran of some of the most acclaimed restaurants in Las Vegas, including those by Joël Robuchon and Wolfgang Puck. “I’ve done the event so many times, I don’t want to come up with stuff. They create a dish and it’s on the menu, so they have a vested interest. It makes it more fun for the students, and for the most part, they like to go out and eat, so they know what’s trendy.”
UNLVINO is an event where everyone is walking around while sipping and snacking, so the students’ dishes are typically one or two bites each, although there will be a street taco station this year. They created 30 portions of each dish for the March tasting; they’ll do 2,000 portions of each appetizer for the event April 14 at the Keep Memory Alive Center in downtown Las Vegas.
Assistant professor Todd Uglow, who leads the UNLVINO class with Sandoval, said about half the students in the class go on to careers in food and beverage, and half pursue event jobs. No matter what path they choose, working on UNLVINO will be a formative experience.
“Every year, I have students come back to me and say, ‘This is way more than