This Boutique Hotel is a Learning Lab for Hospitality Students
College campuses are beautiful year-round, but there’s something extra enchanting about them in the fall when crisp leaves are underfoot, and you can pick up on the palpable excitement of a new school year. In Colorado, there’s a way that you can feel as though you’ve gone back to school, but without, you know, the homework and exam schedules.
Hotel Maverick in Grand Junction is a boutique stay in the heart of the Colorado Mesa University campus where hospitality students learn the ins and outs of hotel management.
I booked a stay here during a recent mother-daughter trip to Grand Junction, a cute and rugged destination on Colorado’s Western Slope. The region is known for its vineyards set amid earthy red mesas, which look especially beautiful during the golden hour, and for its outdoorsy attractions like Rattlesnake Canyon, which has the largest concentration of sandstone arches outside of the much-busier Arches National Park in Utah. You can even see wild horses roam among the plateaus in Little Book Cliffs.
Hotel Maverick matches the region’s uniqueness: It’s like a learning lab for students who, after they graduate, will disperse around the world, taking the classroom and on-site skills they’ve learned to manage hotels, dream up seasonal menus for their restaurants or maybe run their own coffee shops or B&Bs.
What sets this boutique hotel apart is the enthusiasm of students who provide the same level of service you’d expect at the Ritzes and Four Seasons of the world — intuitively helping with bags, remembering guests’ coffee orders, and excited to talk about the local purveyors featured on dinner menus.
“I think the most interesting part to me was learning how personalized and at home the hotel makes all their guests feel,” says Ava Licht, a recent graduate who studied business administration with a focus on hospitality. While in college, she studied abroad in Italy and her dream hospitality job is working on a private boat or a tropical resort.
Ahead, more on the partnership between the hotel and the university and how to have an A+ stay in Grand Junction.
Hotel Maverick: A Unique Learning Lab for Hospitality Students
In any given year, about 50 students work at Hotel Maverick, which Charlestowne Hotels manages.
Hospitality interns get a chance to see different operations, working at the front desk and rotating through all the different departments, including housekeeping, maintenance, sales, food and beverage, and general administration, explains Tammy Anderson, the hotel’s general manager. Some even become managers. CMU Tech students also take classes at the on-site restaurant Devil’s Kitchen and shadow employees in the kitchen to learn valuable cooking skills.
Morgan Watson, a recent graduate of CMU and a former hospitality intern, caught the travel bug young and, inspired by her dad, a veteran in the hospitality industry, knew she wanted to go that route, too. The Maverick provided a good training ground.
“One of the things I have learned is watching how each department works almost like a sports team,” Watson says. “Each department has its role or position, but they all rely on each other to be successful.”
The learning lab is also stylish: Hotel Maverick is a 60-room, dog-friendly hotel. Guest rooms and suites are outfitted with reclaimed wood; some have patios or balconies overlooking the campus. Other amenities include plush robes and a spacious hot tub, an art-filled lobby that’s the perfect place to catch up on emails, and a ground-level cafe, Betty’s.
Devil’s Kitchen: Creative Menus Showcasing Local Ingredients
Devil’s Kitchen is Hotel Maverick’s signature restaurant, with creative menu items starring alongside those that feature local ingredients. (Think: Bison tamales with locally sourced mushrooms and roasted poblanos, seasonal ravioli, and a “Best Slope” salad with a Colorado gin dressing).
The fertile landscape of the Western Slope is a growing region for Colorado’s burgeoning wine scene. Devil’s Kitchen has a proprietary red wine blend, providing students a chance to blend and bottle the vino and work with local winemakers. The restaurant also partners with local wineries for dinners and offers wine pairings and programs for guests, like a gondola picnic at Peachfork Orchards & Vineyards or a private wine tour and barrel tasting at Ordinary Fellow.
Jazz Anderson, a hospitality intern who worked as a line cook at Devil’s Kitchen, said her interest in the industry came about while watching cooking shows growing up and spending time in the kitchen with her Nana.
“I love how all of the chefs come together to collaborate on dishes,” she says. Some of her favorite dishes on the Devil’s Kitchen menu include the tempura deviled eggs with bacon and radish and the maple bacon donuts.
For her — and other hospitality interns — the experience working at the boutique hotel has helped shape their career goals.
“My dream job is to be able to open my own restaurant someday and travel the world to learn about new dishes from different places,” Anderson says. “I also want to make people smile when I make food for them.”