Carla Hall from ABC’s “The Chew” Serves Southern-Style Recipes at Food Truck during Drexel Pep Rally

Celebrity chef Carla Hall and Drexel culinary and hospitality students will dish up Hall's famous hot chicken recipe and others at a food truck on Drexel's campus next week. Photo credit: Ali Blake Photography.

“Top Chef” finalist and ABC’s “The Chew” co-host Carla Hall plans to open a number of casual, Nashville-inspired restaurants called Carla Hall’s Southern Kitchen – and she has recruited students from Drexel University’s Center for Hospitality and Sport Management to help her with everything from recipe development to picking a location.

On Wednesday, Nov. 5 at 5:30 p.m., Hall and some students will test out menu items for the new restaurant by taking over a food truck in front of Drexel’s Daskalakis Athletic Center (33rd and Market St.), where they will be cooking up free samples of Hall’s hot chicken, macaroni and cheese, braised greens and fresh lemonade before the Drexel Basketball Tip-Off Event, which begins at 6 p.m.

The Basketball Tip-Off Event is a meet-and-greet with the men’s and women’s basketball teams for the fans closest to the team, season ticketholders and the DAC Pack, Drexel’s student sport spirit group. At 6:15 p.m., Hall will join the event to welcome fans.

Hall and the students previously took over a food truck in Manhattan’s Flatiron District on Oct. 15, handing out more than 400 portions of food.

On Tuesday, Oct. 7, Hall joined Drexel to experiment with recipes at Drexel’s Dornsife Center, which hosts free community dinners on the first Tuesday of every month. Students from Chef Richard Pepino’s “Food Preservation Techniques” class prepared the buffet-style dinner which was served to approximately 100 members of the Drexel community and the surrounding neighborhoods.

In this unique partnership, culinary and hospitality students at Drexel work alongside Hall and her team to learn every aspect of opening a new restaurant and help develop the first location in New York City.

As part of the collaboration, the Drexel team is working on scaling existing recipes, develop recipes, and test menu items, work on sourcing the best products, analyze food, labor and energy costs, design the restaurant kitchen, test and recommend commercial equipment, create “best practices” for Carla Hall's Southern Kitchen roll-out and help recruit and hire restaurant team.

Drexel students can participate in this opportunity in a number of different ways – students can register for a new fall-term class entitled “Culinary 465: Drexel Restaurant Lab,” which will focus on the project. They can also participate as an extension of the Drexel Food Lab, through volunteering and, in limited cases, through paid work-study positions.

Hall launched a Kickststarter campaign to raise $250,000 in order to get the restaurant off the ground. To learn more, visit ‪http://carlahall.com/kickstartert. The campaign ends on Oct. 29.