Chef Patrick Austin held a box in his hand as he walked into the room — an imaginary food truck for his four culinary students at Capital Area Technical Center to mold into their own.

Everyone jumped in, keeping in mind the flow of food preparation from start to finish, which senior Joseph Bailey said is critical to a tight working space. This was a national restaurant management competition, and they had to get it right.

Austin encouraged the students — Bailey, senior Shannyn Parrish, senior Allison Brann and junior Lizi Lord — to think about their target market range and the things that would appeal to them. The students thought of Austin, a member of the millennial generation, just in the right range for a food truck.

And then it dawned on them: Y2K. Neon and blobject designs and reflective jackets and retro-futuristic art. Beause they were aiming for breakfast, the name, Y2Koffee, came naturally.

“If we wanted our target market to be people like millennials, or college students, we thought of maybe giving them a nostalgic morning,” Parrish said.

The Y2Koffee idea, plus the video they created in the Augusta trade school over painstaking weeks and a Shark Tank-like grilling by culinary judges, won them the national Ecolab Bites and Beats competition in Baltimore this spring.

Their idea came to life this weekend in Chicago — a real food truck, where they served their signature item, floppy disk French toast, to people enjoying live music at the National Restaurant Association Show.

Ideas for the menu flooded out with Austin’s help, as he was the only member of the team alive in 2000. The signature floppy disk French toast. A doughnut based on the video game Neon Wings. A Saturday morning cartoon-themed latte.

“It’s like, none of you were alive for this, but here we go. Let’s do it,” Austin said. “There was a lot of pop culture that I had to definitely teach them about — even a floppy disk. They were like, ‘What is that?'”

Austin is a culinary arts instructor at CATC, Augusta’s regional trade-focused high school. He oversees one side of the school’s ProStart competition-based program — a two-year culinary arts and restaurant management crash course run by the National Restaurant Association Education Foundation. CATC is one of 16 trade schools in Maine to participate in ProStart.

On the culinary side, student groups prepare a three-course meal in one hour with no electricity or running water. Judges evaluate based on safety, sanitation, taste, skill and teamwork.

On ProStart’s management side, where Y2Koffee came about, students present a restaurant plan to judges, who grill them, according to ProStart’s website, on “challenges faced by managers daily.”

At CATC, both the culinary and management teams advanced to this year’s ProStart Invitational in Baltimore, where the Y2Koffee idea was announced as one of two winners of the Bites and Beats competition. The Augusta City Council honored both teams at an April meeting.

When this group first got together in November, the students hardly knew each other, Austin said. Parrish, Austin said, was one of the shiest students in the school. Now — “not so much,” Austin said, laughing.

“I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, get out there, so I joined ProStart,” Parrish said. “At first, I tried for culinary. Didn’t work out, so I switched to management. But it was a really fun experience. And I certainly did get out of my comfort zone. I feel like I learned a lot.”

That’s what Austin loves most about sponsoring teams in this annual competition. The students grow so quickly, he said, that it’s almost difficult to believe. In comments to the Augusta City Council last month, he teared up with pride.

“Every single year, seeing myself in them and seeing the growth that they get to do — as part of my job — is just unbelievable,” Austin said. “These students will look back on this experience and have such a positive light about it.”

Before going to the University of Maine in the fall, Bailey has one more skills competition in Atlanta in June. Parrish is enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Brann will head to Southern Maine Community College to continue studying culinary arts, and Lord, a junior, will be in Austin’s classes again next year.