Hard Work Is a Main Ingredient to Success for Culinary Students

There are two reasons Michael Wainwright is paying $750 a month to show up at 5:30 each weekday at the Los Angeles International Culinary Institute in Burbank.

The first is being able to study with culinary luminary Raimund Hofmeister, who gave up a $100,000-plus executive chef position at the Century Plaza hotel to open the school.

The second is Wainwright’s belief that Hofmeister’s teachings can help him realize his dream-in-progress, the Rockaway Beach Club Cafe in Palm Desert, which he sees as clearly as if it were 1995, when he plans to open the now nonexistent restaurant’s doors.

Wainwright is one of 11 students in the first, $13,500, 18-month professional class of the institute, most of whom have had extensive previous experience in professional food preparation.

He endures the expense, demands, exhaustion and pressure of this hands-on, often dead-on-your-feet educational experience because he figures it’s small potatoes compared to what he ultimately has to gain.

“I believe that the things Chef Hofmeister knows and is willing to teach me will make a difference, not just in my abilities, but in my career and my life,” said the Bronx-born Wainwright, who began his restaurant career 30 years ago as a dishwasher.

The alarm clock rings at 4 a.m. Monday through Friday in Wainwright’s Newhall home, and an hour and a half later he is at the culinary institute’s facility at the Equestrian Center in Burbank putting on his chef’s toque and outfit.

He’s now prepared for the six-hour weekday program that combines the two traditional methods of a chef’s training: apprentice and classroom instruction.

The three-hour demonstration portion of the instruction begins in the classroom and training kitchen promptly at 6 a.m. Students are then required to work from 9:30 a.m. until 2 p.m. in the institute’s $1-million, state-of-the-art, stainless steel kitchen, where lunches and dinners are prepared for the adjoining Classroom Restaurant and the less formal Equestrian Bar & Grill.

Under the direction of the institute’s instructors, hand-picked professional chefs and Hofmeister himself, Wainwright and his fellow classmates labor preparing meat, foul, salads, pastry and vegetables.

At 2:30 p.m., with that non-paying but compulsory duty completed, Wainwright heads for Gelson’s in Encino, where he works from 3 to 11 p.m. in the deli department, earning his keep and the money that pays his tuition.

By midnight he is back in Newhall, where he tries to catch up on the institute’s required reading, and three or four hours later it all begins again.

Classmate Abraham Figueroa, a 30-year-old Guatemalan-born Tujunga resident, has it easy by comparison.

He gets up by 5, is at school by 6, and, after working in the restaurants’ kitchen until 2:30 p.m., waits tables in the dining room from 5 to 10:30 or 11 p.m. With no travel time to another job, he has about two hours in the afternoon to hit the books.

Like Wainwright and others in the class, Figueroa has a long history in the food-service industry. But in spite of that, or maybe because of that, he is still in awe of the school’s guiding light.

“Although all our instructors are first-rate and bring a lot to the learning process, when Chef Hofmeister is lecturing and demonstrating, we know we are in the presence of one of the greats,” Figueroa said.

Although other classes for professionals, and beginners, are being formed at the institute, members of this first group are aware of their special place in what will become the institute’s history.

It’s a diverse group.

Kevin Zink, 21, was raised and trained in the culinary arts in New Mexico but said he wanted to elevate his cooking abilities. “I heard that Chef Hofmeister was starting a new cooking school, and I decided to do whatever I needed to do to get into his first class.”

Greg Johnson, 28, a native of Monrovia, worked in special effects in the movies after school. But as a former cook who never lost the hunger for cooking, he too signed up.

Christine Akona, 39, a former interior designer, is one of only two in the class with no professional cooking experience. “She had determination and real fire,” Hofmeister said, adding that he will not let others enroll in the institute without prior experience, saying it’s like asking someone to take advanced French without ever going through French I and II.

The program at the L.A. International Culinary Institute is similar to others at highly rated schools around the country, including the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, N.Y. ($25,000 for a 21-month course), Johnson & Wales in Providence, R.I. ($16,470 for a 24-month program), and the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco ($17,800 for an 18-month course).

Of course, local students might consider Los Angeles Trade Technical Institute, where the 18-month culinary arts course costs $200, although Trade Tech culinary arts director, Ernest Green, doesn’t seem offended by Hofmeister’s well-bred upstart.

“Raimund has set up an excellent, comprehensive program at his new Culinary Institute,” Green said, “and I have nothing but praise and a little jealousy for the beautiful equipment he has and the program he offers.”

But, Green pointed out, whereas Trade Tech provides well-schooled workers to the food industry, Hofmeister is in the process of creating high-profile cooks and possible culinary stars.