At The Laurel Hotel & Spa, students learn the business of hospitality
A laurel leaf can end up in a stockpot or on the head of a scholar. Auburn University found a use for both meanings.
The Laurel Hotel & Spa sits on the university campus, where the name points to what is happening inside. Food and education share the same building, and students from Auburn’s Horst Schulze School of Hospitality Management learn the business by helping run a luxury hotel, its restaurants, coffee shop, and other culinary spaces.
The Laurel is the school’s teaching hotel, part of the Tony & Libba Rane Culinary Science Center. Students work alongside experienced hospitality professionals while serving paying guests, which makes the classroom unusually practical. A lesson in service might happen during check-in, culinary training might unfold over dinner at 1856 Culinary Residence, and coffee education begins downstairs with green coffee beans and a roaster.
For guests, the experience starts at The Library, a private space reserved for hotel residents. Check-in skips the traditional front desk in favor of a more conversational welcome, followed by a review of the property and its amenities. The Library continues feeding guests throughout the day with four complimentary presentations, including breakfast, a light lunch, evening hors d’oeuvres and dessert.
Food becomes an even larger part of the education at 1856 Culinary Residence, the center’s teaching restaurant. Students work both front and back of house while learning from established chefs, and much of what grows in Auburn’s horticulture program can make its way into the restaurant.
In 2025, 1856 became Auburn’s first restaurant recognized by the MICHELIN Guide and the first teaching restaurant in the United States to receive the distinction. The restaurant’s Chef in Residence program has brought chefs including James Beard Award winner Joël Antunes and five-time James Beard nominee Ford Fry into the kitchen, giving students the kind of access that would be difficult to reproduce in a lecture hall.
The education continues beyond the dining room. At Thrive Farmers Coffee Roastery & Café, students can follow coffee from bean to cup while guests stop in for a morning drink or something to eat. Hey Day Market gives budding chefs and food entrepreneurs another format to study, this time through a multi-concept food hall serving everything from Malaysian street noodles to pizza. New Realm Brewing Co. adds brewing to the curriculum with a teaching brewery, tasting room and microbiology laboratory.
Then there is the roof. Walt’s on the Roof overlooks Auburn’s campus and Samford Hall, with a pool, lounge space and more than 4,000 square feet of edible gardens nearby. The rooftop crops connect the hospitality program to Auburn’s broader agricultural work, something guests can explore through the hotel’s Garden to Table experience. The tour moves through FoodU’s vertical gardens, greenhouses and raised beds before ending at The Laurel’s rooftop gardens and lunch at 1856.
At sunset, the same rooftop shifts gears. Guests can reserve a Sunset Toast at Walt’s, where sparkling wine and a charcuterie board arrive as the light changes over campus.
That range is what makes The Laurel unusual. Students are learning how hospitality works at breakfast, over a tasting menu, behind an espresso machine and during evening service. Guests are part of that education simply by showing up for dinner or checking into a room.
For future chefs, restaurateurs and hoteliers, the lesson is happening in real time. While the campus stirs around them, service goes on.
