€150 And An Empty Room: How A French Hospitality School Is Pushing Experiential Learning Further

Walk into almost any business school in the world today and you will hear the same two words used to describe the future of education: experiential learning.

It appears in deans’ speeches. It anchors recruitment brochures. It is increasingly seen as one of the most important ways to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

And for good reason.

Across higher education, institutions are working to move learning beyond the traditional classroom through consulting projects, simulations, field experiences, and entrepreneurial initiatives. The ambition is shared: help students develop not only knowledge, but judgment, adaptability, and the ability to act in uncertain environments.

What is happening at Institut Lyfe — formerly known as Institut Paul Bocuse, in Lyon — is one expression of just how far that ambition can be taken.

€150, AN EMPTY ROOM, AND A GUEST LIST OF THEIR OWN

The exercise is deceptively simple. A small team of third-year students receives €150, a vacant dining space on campus, and a window of a few weeks. The brief: design a concept, build a brand, source the ingredients, write the menu, set the price, and open the doors to real, paying guests.

There is no parallel kitchen team waiting to step in. No professor running service from the wings. No reset at the end of the night.

If the team undercosts a dish, they absorb the gap. If service slows, the diners notice. If a member of the team is having a difficult day, the others adapt — because in three hours, twenty seats will be full.

For many students, it is the first time their decisions truly carry weight. And that is precisely the point.

“We could have kept this exercise inside a fully simulated environment,” explains arc LAHOREAU, Executive Chef & Director of Culinary Arts. “But the deepest learning seems to happen when students are no longer protected from the consequences of their own choices — and from the trust their guests are placing in them.”

THE POINT IS NOT THE RESTAURANT. IT IS WHAT THE RESTAURANT REVEALS

It would be easy to read the program as an entrepreneurship exercise. A pop-up. A campus startup.

That framing misses what makes it different.

The restaurant is not the destination. It is the vehicle. What the program is really designed to surface are the parts of professional life that no syllabus can quite teach: the small disagreement that has to be resolved before opening; the supplier who calls at the worst possible moment; the guest whose expectations differ from what the team had imagined; the moment when one student realises they need to ask another for help.

These are not edge cases. They are the substance of hospitality. And, increasingly, of any career that involves working with other people under real conditions.

By the time service begins, students have already navigated dozens of these moments. By the time the last guest leaves, they have lived through dozens more. The kitchen and the dining room become, in effect, classrooms for everything a slide deck cannot hold.

A CURRICULUM THAT REACHES INTO THE HUMAN

Most descriptions of experiential learning emphasise the operational side: the project, the deliverable, the result. Lyfe’s program is unusual in how deliberately it also reaches into the human side of work.

Each project is paired with structured reflection. Teams debrief together. Faculty members sit with students after service and walk through what happened — not only what was cooked, but what was felt. How was tension managed when the pace accelerated? Who stepped up, and who stepped back? How did the team respond to a guest’s feedback, whether warm or critical? What did each student learn about the way they show up under real conditions?

The questions are not soft. They sit at the core of what hospitality demands.

“Hospitality is, in the end, about presence,” says Frédéric Beaumont-Debresie, Dean “You cannot perform presence. You either bring it, or you do not. What we ask of our students is to develop the inner capacity to remain attentive, generous and clear-headed even when the situation is demanding.”

Collaboration is taught as a discipline rather than as a personality trait. So is the ability to receive feedback without becoming defensive, to repair a misstep, to read a room, to recover from a difficult moment and re-enter service composed. These are not extras layered on top of the technical training. They are the training.

WHY A WIDER AUDIENCE IS PAYING ATTENTION

A growing number of educators in business and management are taking a closer interest in hospitality programs — not as a niche specialisation, but as a laboratory for skills the wider working world is starting to revalue.

Part of that interest is being shaped by a shift many organisations are now navigating: as more transactional and analytical work becomes assisted or accelerated by artificial intelligence, the distinctive capacities of professionals are moving elsewhere. Toward the relational. Toward the ability to read a moment, host a difficult conversation, build trust quickly, and design an experience another person will actually remember.

Hospitality schools have been training for this for a long time.

“What we teach has not changed in its essence,” reflects Cédric Favre, head of faculty. “What has changed is how visible its value is becoming, in industries that used to consider it peripheral.”

WHAT STUDENTS TAKE WITH THEM

Graduates of the program go on to a wide range of careers, in and beyond hospitality: restaurant groups, hotel companies, luxury brands, consulting, food entrepreneurship, family businesses. What they describe carrying with them is rarely a specific technique.

It is the memory of a service that almost went sideways and did not, because someone on the team stayed calm. It is the experience of having had to look a guest in the eye and acknowledge a mistake. It is the quiet confidence that comes from having already, at twenty-one, been responsible for an entire evening’s experience for strangers who paid to be there.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF PROOF

There is no shortage of conversation, across business education, about how to make learning more real. Lyfe’s program is one answer among many — not the only one, and not a model every institution could or should replicate identically.

But it does illustrate something worth paying attention to: when students are invited to step into full responsibility, with support but without protection from the consequences, the learning that follows is qualitatively different. It carries into the body, not only the notebook.

The principle is, in a way, very old. It is closer to the spirit of apprenticeship than to the modern classroom.

What may be most useful for the wider conversation about experiential learning is not the specifics of the €150 budget or the empty room. It is the underlying conviction that the deepest professional formation happens when students are trusted to host something real — and to grow, a little, inside the experience.

That is a conviction worth borrowing from.

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Benjamin Stévenin is former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education. Frederic Beaumont-Debresie the academic dean of Institut Lyfe, a leading hospitality school in France. 

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