After seven months of hard work and collaboration from seniors Maria-Flor Bordinhon, Amaia Frank, Delanie Knight, and Quinn Loughton, the Advanced Studies Culinary Prostart team were announced the winners of the 2025 Nevada State Level Competition in the Managerial Category. The competition was held at the Sysco Las Vegas Distribution Center on March 1.

For most of the team, the decision to work together came naturally. While Bordinhon wasn’t in the group originally, her decision to transfer proved to be a wise decision.

“It was initially just Amaia, Laney and Quinn,” Bordinhon said. “I was gonna do the competition with Ary and Zarah. But then Chef [Hadobas] and I decided that it was better if I switched to Amaia, Laney, and Quinn’s group. And to be honest, it was the best decision I made. Delaney became my best friend, and I’m so glad I’m in this group. We all had similar ideas on how to build the restaurant.”

From there, the four students began creating their concept: Arte Al Mare (Art at the Sea), a coastal-themed restaurant with a focus on accessibility, sustainability, and creativity. However, with their idea for the restaurant came a long list of challenges.

“The project itself has so many different steps, from the floor plan to even how long it takes your servers to bring the plates out,” Bordinhon said. “But the most difficult part was for sure marketing. I can’t count how many times Laney and I changed our second marketing tactic, especially how many times we had to redo the math.”

Frank alleviated the challenges of the group’s work by making sure that everyone’s ideas were taken into consideration.

“There will be times when no one likes your idea, or that you say something and no one listens — then says the same thing a couple minutes later, which can be frustrating,” Frank said. “But I think we all complemented each other with our ideas and other skills that we brought to the table. It was really important that we all had different backgrounds.”

To stay on track, the team used their class time wisely, often spending time outside of school to work on their concept.

“We made sure to plan ahead for every week and even be ahead of what we were actually working on in class,” Knight said. “Even now in preparing for nationals, we all looked at our schedules and based on that, we decided what weeks we will work on specific sections.”

From using the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, a planning tool used to determine the group’s contributions to the project, to marketing, each student utilized their different skills in an effective way. 

“I think a big part of our success was our compatibility,” Loughton said. “Each member of our group knew their individual strengths and stuck with them. For example, I was very good at the operational and concept parts of our restaurant, how it flows, the inner workings, hiring, staff distribution, and purchasing. Flor was very good with the menu side of things. Delaney was good with the marketing and customer service parts of the restaurant and handled all of our marketing tactics. Amaia was good with our concept, doing research on regions and artists to make sure that whatever decisions we made with the project still matched our original concept.”

On the day of the competition, the team arrived together, doing their best to numb any nervousness they had.

“Competition day was crazy to me,” Bordinhon said. “Delaney picked all of us up, and we drove together blasting music in the car. We had memorized our pitches word by word, so we were trying to distract ourselves from the thought of actually doing the competition. For me, I was kind of disassociated from the real moment. So when they called AACT (Academy of Arts, Careers and Technology) as second place, that’s when it hit me. I started bawling my eyes out because all the weight and anxiety just got off my shoulders.”

Loughton felt the win was especially validating because of his countless hours of time put into the project.

“There were a lot of emotions across all of us,” Loughton said. “We all felt excited and glad because we got first place. We felt anxious because we had waited so long in anticipation to hear it and worried because we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us for the national competition. When they finally called us first place, I had the most over the top reaction, where I effectively jumped out of my seat and hit my knees very hard. Walking up to the front I just couldn’t stop smiling, proud of my group and all the work we had done.”

Now, after winning the ProStart competition and advancing to the finals, the team is now even more focused on refining its approach.

“For nationals, we just finished reviewing and editing our project,” Frank said. “This week we’ll be working on our pitches. A challenge last time was the noncertainty we had with the timeline and how the day would go, but now we have a schedule and practically everything planned out. I hope we don’t run into many challenges, but we have been preparing for months on this either way, so I feel as if we are on the right track.”