What We Wish We Had Done With Our Dorm Kitchen
And we thought we were enterprising for selling Cuban coffee in our Chicago dorm during college. It was great; there were no startup costs (we'd received a stovetop cafetera as a going-away gift, and mom and dad had sent the coffee and the little plastic espresso cups that are impossible to find outside of Miami), so all of the 50 cents we got for each shot was pure profit. But we ran a small operation, only selling coffee during midterms and finals.
Bryan Zupon, a senior at Duke, took that idea about 200 steps further by running his own restaurant. In his dorm room. Zupon's dorm seems nicer than most: an apartment-style setup with a standard kitchen, which he has equipped with a vacuum sealer, two refurbished laboratory water baths, and an induction burner. It's out of this small space that he's run Z Kitchen since September of his junior year, with dinner service every weekend except for during midterms and finals.
Our jaw dropped when we saw the photos that accompany the article. Just check out the presentation, and then look at the kitchen with which he's working. Incredibly impressive. We're curious about how much he charges for dinner; we imagine college students can't afford something too expensive. But Zupon's an economics major who's going to join a consulting firm, so he's not doing it as charity either. Two years, multiple dinners every weekend...he's probably paid off that vacuum sealer and then some.
Too Cool for School [New York Times]
