Brianna Borin loves food. Not just eating it, but serving it. In a way that makes dining as important as cuisine.
Her first job was in a restaurant — a hostess at age 15 — and her first major job after spring graduation also is in a restaurant, assistant manager of a chic LoDo breakfast place called Snooze, run by three 1990s DU grads.
“I love to cook,” says the 21-year-old BSBA candidate at DU’s School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management. “But I love the way food and the dining experience can make people feel.”
She’d better. Starting June 20 she’ll be getting up every morning at 4:45 to make sure the eggs are fresh, the coffee’s hot and the pancakes are fluffy at the LoDo Snooze and its sister restaurant that opens this summer on Colorado Boulevard and Seventh Avenue.
“I love people and the hustle and bustle,” Borin says. “I’m not a desk-job kind of girl.”
Nor is she afraid to roll up her sleeves and learn the meat and potatoes of the restaurant business. Some of this came from a 500-hour internship she did at J. Alexander’s in Park Meadows, where she did “everything from dishwasher to grill to fryer to food prep. I did well enough that they wanted me to work for them.”
She declined. It was important to Borin to finish college and learn other aspects of the restaurant biz, including a strenuous stint at a hotel school in Switzerland and a campus internship doing inventory and accounting for Sodexho in Magness Arena. Summers she worked at a steakhouse and an Egg and I in her hometown of Cheyenne, Wyo.
It all added up to valuable exposure in her chosen field.
“[DU] makes us do internships and work hours and step out of the building with experience,” Borin says. “They teach us to know whether or not this is what we want to do. In a lot of other programs you don’t actually get into the industry. HRTM makes you do that.”
Just where the inclination for food came from is a bit hard to figure. Mom is a family physician, dad a pharmacist and Borin’s sister is studying neuroscience at Brandeis University.
“I do food, not lives,” Borin laughs.
Nor does she do numbers like her brother, a financial adviser at Bank of America, or sports like her little brother, a high school soccer star who is considering DU.
“I run and work out but don’t have a lot of eye-hand coordination,” Borin admits.
She’ll be doing plenty of running at her new job making sure customers don’t lose when they breakfast at Snooze.
“I’m excited,” she says. “It’s great for me to be stepping into something that’s growing.”
First, though, she’ll travel to London to visit friends and she’ll attend a cooking class with her mother in Napa Valley.
Then it’s onto her new job and the fine art of “pickling” customers.
“It’s a touch of service,” Borin explains. “Going out of your way to do something no one else would do for them.” The Snooze way.
For more information or to watch streaming video of DU’s commencement ceremony, please visit DU’s commencement Web site.