PORT TOWNSEND — The meal of spaghetti with red sauce, Caesar salad and garlic bread could have been served on white dinnerware by a waiter at a nice restaurant with white tablecloths and accompanied by a bottle of wine.

Instead, it was served by two Port Townsend High School students in compostable clamshells accompanied by a bottle of water out the window of a food truck parked on Evans Vista.

Emil Brown and Raivyn Johnson planned and prepared the meal for their senior project in the school’s culinary arts program.

The food truck — the Culinary Cruiser — is a way for students to showcase their skills, said Jennifer Kruse, the school’s Career and Technical Education culinary arts instructor.

“The food truck provides hands-on experience and real-world experience,” Kruse said. “Students in the class not only gain culinary skills to take into the restaurant world, but business skills to open their own business.”

The district purchased the 18-foot-long former laundry delivery truck for $12,000 off of Craigslist in the summer of 2022. Western Food Trucks & Trailers in Richland installed a grill, burners, warming oven, hood system and exhaust fan, and refrigeration, electrical and plumbing systems.

The overall cost of the truck, buildout and wrap was about $75,000, Kruse said. Most of the funding came from a Carl D. Perkins federal grant for CTE education. A local donor stepped up to purchase some of the equipment.

The next item on the program’s wish list is a portable generator so the truck can operate without plugging into a power source.

The original goal was to have the truck up and running by the spring of 2023, however the date kept being pushed back due a number of issues, such as electrical work and permitting that took longer than anticipated.

The Culinary Cruiser finally made its debut last fall at a football game.

Kruse has turned down many requests for the food truck to appear at festivals and cater events.

The program isn’t quite ready to hit the road yet and — critically — the truck is first of all a learning tool, not a commercial venture.

That doesn’t mean the food truck won’t be visible in the community.

“We want to come with four to six menus that work for the food truck, so if somebody wants us to be at an event, they’ve already been tested,” Kruse said.

On Friday, Brown, Johnson and helper Jasper Ziese prepped for the Saturday event when they would serve the 75 meals they prepared along with the 200 chocolate chip cookies they had baked.

Senior projects in the culinary arts program must have a community element. Kruse said Brown and Johnson had known from the start that they wanted to create a meal and experience that filled an unmet need.

“We wanted to serve something hot and something almost everyone would like, and not many people don’t like spaghetti,” Brown said.

They chose the location because homeless people and those experiencing food scarcity congregated there.

“We wanted to serve people in need, and we wanted to make sure it was a real meal,” she said.

The two seniors and helper, junior Jasper Ziese, made two batches of pasta sauce: one with meat and one without. The students were mindful throughout the planning process of creating an experience that recognized the humanity of those they would be serving, said education consultant Stacey Larsen.

“They wanted to make sure the food was respectful and that people were treated with dignity,” she said.

The Culinary Cruiser isn’t always on the road.

Those in the culinary arts program also prepare and serve meals from the food truck to students on campus. They must develop a menu, calculate food costs, determine serving sizes and establish how much to charge to break even.

For their food truck project, senior Kyla Davidson and sophomore Lillie Pond made and sold ham and cheese sandwiches with a side salad.

“We had a bumpy start because there was no hot water,” Pond said. “But we took the day before to prep so we were ready.”

Leaning into the local food system and learning how to prepare healthy meals from scratch is also part of the culinary program’s overall goal. The high school’s garden grows food for the cafeteria salad bar and the culinary arts program.

“Now with the food truck project we have plans to plant in the spring 100 pounds of potatoes,” Kruse said. “We’ll have cucumbers because we know people like pickles, we’ll do chimichuri sauce and pesto. Healthy, easy-to-grow types of foods.”

Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com