The room is lit with soft lighting and jazz plays quietly through the speakers. The other diners talk to each other but not loud enough to hear more than a few lines of their conversation. The smell of cooking meals reaches us before our meals do. Once the food is brought to our table, we take a few moments to eat with our eyes before digging in with our forks.

The food – taco salad for my sister and pizza for myself – is seasoned well and we both say so. This evening could be found at a downtown restaurant, but it was actually on the Bob Jones University campus. Welcome to the Bistro.

During the fall semester, Culinary Arts students host the Bistro from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Friday evenings. Customers could dine-in and purchase a handmade meal. Breuanna Howell, one of the three students involved, estimated that 10 hours of work went into The Bistro every week.

They served different kinds of pizzas, classy nachos, salads and sandwiches, along with a new dessert every week. The prices were low for the kind of quality that came with the dishes. I was able to sample a few, and my favorite by far was their taco salad. The meat was tender, and the greens were fresh. Every bite was packed with spices and topped with corn strips. My favorite dessert was the birthday cake ice cream. It tasted exactly like birthday cake and was topped with rainbow sprinkles.

“We have really, really good food,” Howell said.

The work is unpaid for the students as part of their educational experience, but tips help fund culinary field trips and other expenses of the major.

Chef David Miller is the faculty head of the Bistro. He said that the Bistro is a culinary arts tradition for the past 20 years and “offered other concepts over the years in conjunction with the Bistro or as a slight alteration: Dinners-to-go, Soup & Bread to-go, [and] World Cafe.”

Last Friday was the last bistro of the semester. Next semester the culinary students will open a bakeshop on Tuesday evenings. If you were unable to visit the Bistro this semester, definitely give the bakeshop a try!