"We want to be watching our germs,” Becky Swain explained to the 28 restaurant workers seated on the floor in front of her. “We’re not putting our fingers in our mouths or our noses or our eyes or ears.”

Though they may have needed a few reminders about hygiene and other food service basics, the children in Swain’s  kindergarten class at P.S. 150 were very much ready to run a restaurant, called “Red,” right inside their classroom.

One morning last month the five-year-olds donned aprons and uniforms (red shirts and aprons) and ably performed their jobs as coat checkers, hosts and hostesses, wait staff, chefs, stewards, bussers and cashiers.

The customers (parents and relatives) dined on appetizers of cherry tomatoes, carrots and celery, a main course choice of pasta with tomato sauce or English muffin pizza, and for dessert, cookies topped with sprinkles.

The din and bustle of a real restaurant  filled the room as waiters yelled orders to chefs, bussers and stewards paced the room, offering grated cheese, salad dressing and water to the customers. All the while, diners gleefully chatted over their kindergartner-concocted dishes and cashiers stood beside registers (cardboard boxes, actually), ready to take the money.

“This place has a lot of energy,” one diner said between bites. “It’s very lively.”

“It has a great feel,” another replied.

This was the culmination of a months-long restaurant study that Swain integrated into the kindergarten curriculum, from math and writing to social studies and art.  

“It spills over into everything,” she said.

The children visited the nearby restaurant Gee Whiz to see how it was organized and Gigino’s to study the various jobs. At City Hall restaurant, they got a look at a kitchen, then were treated to a special meal.

But the most important lesson was about cooperation.

“They knew they had to complete their individual jobs, otherwise the restaurant as a whole wouldn’t work,” Swain said. “That concept of teamwork extends to the classroom and what we do in kindergarten every day.”

For the past few years, Swain’s students have studied bakeries and then run one for a few hours. But that was mere preparation for this most ambitious enterprise—one that she could barely imagine back in the fall.

“In the end we’re going to have a restaurant,” Swain recalls telling parents early in the year, at curriculum night. “I’m not really sure how it’s going to happen yet but it will come together and you will come to our restaurant and we’ll serve you.”

Fortunately, Swain had the valuable help of someone with experience.

Christina Santiago, a teaching mentor in the school, had pioneered the restaurant study at a school on the Upper West Side in the late 1980s. As a graduate student at the Bank Street College of Education back then, she wrote about the project for her thesis and, since then, other classroom teachers have adopted the idea.

It is hard to imagine any of them coming off any more smoothly.

“It was like when you have a play with a class and you rehearse them and rehearse them and you think, ‘Oh, my God, they’re not getting this,’” said Santiago. “But they came in that morning and they were like magic.”