UNLV students learn ropes with culinary show

Lights! Camera! ... Porcini mushroom pockets?

UNLV students from the Hank Greenspun School of Communications went back into the kitchen last week to tape another five episodes of "This Ain't No Buffet."

The 30-minute, three-segment episodes, produced by students in the Broadcast Practicum class, feature the talent and tastes of Las Vegas chefs.

The new episodes will be aired Thursdays and Sundays beginning in June on Cox Cable Channel 4. The college shares the channel with the county and city governments.

"This is the first day of our shooting," professor Dennis Mazzocco, said Tuesday. "It's always hectic the first day."

Wires, lights, cameras and cue cards crowded the Banfi Room, the university's teaching kitchen in Beam Hall, while guest chef Warner Zeffer, executive chef at Bally's, demonstrated how to make Porcini mushroom pockets, a vegetarian dish.

The show is aimed at highlighting fine cuisine that can be found in Las Vegas when one looks beyond the endless buffets. Thus the show's title: "This Ain't No Buffet."

"Most people think of Las Vegas as a lot of cheap buffets, cheap prime rib and cheap breakfast," host and UNLV professor and chef Claude Lambertz said. "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

But quality food has always been part of Las Vegas, he said. "It's just never been recognized."

Guest chefs were brought in from Lawry's Prime Rib, Harrah's Range Steak House, the Gold Coast and, for dessert day, the Rio.

Because it's filmed in the school's teaching kitchen, taping must wait until finals week when there are no classes. Then the kitchen is crowded with broadcast equipment instead of student chefs.

"The charm of doing the show in the hotel teaching kitchen is well worth it," Mazzocco said.

The drawback is that during finals week, it's a struggle to grab a studio audience. "Whoever we can get, we use," Mazzocco said. "Students recruited friends, we took people from off the street."

The audience was squeezed into the room and filmed during a cooking demonstration by Lambertz and co-host and student Adam Mohr. That film will be edited into future shows.

Along with the guest chef, the two hosts prepare a dish for each show. Tuesday's dish, Won Ton soup, will be featured on the same show as Zeffer's mushroom pockets.

Mazzocco said the show is still in its rough stages, but he's hoping the show will someday see a slot on KLVX Channel 10 -- the local PBS affiliate -- and eventually a national cable station.

Channel 10 would love to see Las Vegas have a local cooking show, Shelli Jones, KLVX program manager, said.

"Everybody looks only at Las Vegas buffets," she said. "It would do tremendous things for Las Vegas as a tourist site to have a show that would feature the incredible chefs in town."

Jones, who has yet to see "This Ain't No Buffet," says that in addition to an educational appeal, a cooking show needs an entertaining host to succeed. "Everyone who is watching the show is not necessarily watching for the recipes but to be entertained," she said.

The show also needs a high quality of production and writing that flows from recipe to recipe, she said.

The production quality of the first three episodes last semester were still rough, Lambertz said. Rented equipment and professionals were brought in for the third and fourth episodes.

But this semester -- with a little more experience behind them -- the students are running the show and anticipating better results.

Students fit four cameras into the teaching kitchen to provide more angles. Control and engineering units are in the kitchen next door.

For "further dimension on culinary artistry," Mazzocco said, each episode includes a prefilmed one- to two-minute video of trips to local markets for fresh produce or meat.

Most of the students have taken production classes, video editing, writing for broadcast, mass communication and introduction to studio advertising.

"It's a very intensive course on communication. In some measures, they're operating on a graduate level," Mazzocco said.

Yet while technical skills are necessary, the focus is on production, he said. The students are learning to be creative, think visually and think logically. "Those are skills they can take anywhere."

For many of his students, those skills will be taken into television production.

This year, the focus has been on food.

A cooking show is a wonderful way to teach students about doing television because you have to understand the five senses and produce them in a two-dimensional medium, Mazzocco said.

"We're learning how to produce -- how to plan a show from scratch," Jean-Paul Hellendall a UNLV communications major said from behind the camera. "Filming is the easiest part. Planning is the hard part."

Five seniors take the role of producer with help from other students. The students select and contact the chefs, discuss with them what to expect as well as what dishes to prepare and what to wear. They write the scripts and prepare for production day.

"It's a lot of coordination, making sure all the little stuff is done -- all the details," Susan Bush, a graduating senior, said. She was in last semester's class, which created the title and format of the show.

"We started with a blank page," she said. "It's interesting to see how a group comes together as a team and ends the semester with a finished product."

This semester Bush is supervising producer for the class and producer of the dessert show.

Mazzocco said the class will continue with a cooking show, but at a cost of $5,000 per episode, funds are needed.

"Right now they are trying to get underwriters for the series," he said. The students hoped to do 10 shows this last semester, but ran out of money.

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