He loves the Titanic. He wants to know what it was like to be on board, to experience the best the Edwardian Age had to offer.

The Charlotte Observer reports that Herman, 48, got a taste of his dream last month. He got to be the maitre d' for dinner on the Titanic.

Well, sort of. Instead of an ornate dining room on a doomed ship, it was on the fifth floor of Johnson & Wales University.

And this was a shared dream, a senior project where Herman, Tyler Eason, 22, and Cory Hitson, 29, had to command a dozen other seniors.

In the J&W cooking programs, most students spend two years getting associate degrees in culinary arts or baking and pastry. If they go on for bachelor's degrees, they spend the next two years on management.

"If you could just cook and put a plate out, it would be easy," says Brad Beran, an associate professor in hospitality. "But you have to do it profitably."

Each week, three students have to be the managers. They pick a theme, set a menu and a budget, develop recipes, assign fellow students to jobs, and then make the whole thing run, a theoretical restaurant that only opens for one meal.

The real trick is that the managers have to manage. They aren't allowed to do it; they have to lead the other students through it.

The clock started running at 4 p.m., with dinner at 5:30. Beran floated around with his clipboard.

He's a stickler for safety. He stopped Brianne Staggs near the stoves, where bacon was sizzling.

There's a violation here. Staggs stood, startled, as the smell of bacon wafted around.

"Stop thinking like a student," Beran coaxed her.

She forgot to turn on the exhaust fan.

"She's pastry," someone teased her. "She doesn't know what a range hood is."

With 90 minutes to go, the atmosphere was light. Julia Spiller, mixing herbed flour for the chicken, clapped her hands and sent a puff of white at Troy Harsey's face.

Melanie Cochrane was red-nosed and teary - four years in school, but she still cries over onions.

In the dining room, where Herman was overseeing table setting, Beran spotted another violation.

Herman stood still. There was no food in the dining room yet. Beran pointed at a crate of glassware on the floor.

"Five-second rule?" Herman pleaded. Nope - back to the dishwasher.

Hitson dashed between three prep tables and the stove, talking people through amounts.

"Oh, my God, I want to help so bad," he moaned.

By 5:15, the noise ratcheted up. Ice crashed into metal pitchers, chicken sizzled, range hoods roared, dishes clattered. If they actually hit an iceberg, no one would have heard it.

Christopher Routh started to whistle and others joined in: "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

Cheers erupted when Herman came through in his maitre d' outfit, found at Morris Costume: White tie, swallowtail coat, white spats. Add a cane and a monocle and he'd look like Mr. Peanut.

The hallway outside the dining room filled with guests. Tyler Eason's parents came from Yorktown, Va., the first time they've eaten their son's food at school. Another guest teased them about "your $80,000 dinner" - the cost of four years' tuition.

Herman seated the 24 guests and dinner began: Cream of barley soup. Cold asparagus with champagne-saffron vinaigrette. Chicken Lyonnaise topped with soft onions and served with meltingly soft roasted potatoes and minted pea timbales.

It ended with ice cream and eclairs filled with intricate swirls of pastry cream.

In the kitchen, Hitson shed his white chef's coat and frantically fanned under his T-shirt.

He fretted that the wine was too cold, the asparagus bundles took too long to assemble. But he finally admitted it went OK.

"You want to watch everything, do everything. But then when you turn back around, they're doing it better. And you just go, 'Thanks, guys.'"