An Appetite for Teaching : Culinary arts: Master chef Raimund Hofmeister walked away from the big time and big money, putting his reputation on the line to start his own cooking school.

Raimund Hofmeister quit his job as executive chef at the Century Plaza Hotel and Tower to set up a cooking school, the Los Angeles International Culinary Institute in Burbank. It’s like Kevin Costner retiring, after winning his Oscars, to become an acting coach.

Why would anyone walk away from the big time and big money to put his reputation on the line and himself in debt?

It’s 3 a.m. and Raimund Hofmeister is as motionless as an ice carving as he sits slumped in his cluttered, windowless office staring blankly at the wall.

The tightly wound, intense master chef has put in another 18-hour day. His friends say, only half-joking, that he’s some kind of superman who doesn’t need sleep.

The diners and drinkers have gone from the two restaurants that Hofmeister runs here at the Equestrian Center in Burbank, and the kitchen and serving help from The Classroom Restaurant and adjacent Equestrian Bar & Grill have long since headed home.

Bone tired, Hofmeister takes his feet from the desk and his toque from his head, and begins the ritual of closing up and thinking about tomorrow.

By the time he gets to his North Hills home, his wife, Erika, and children--a son, 12, and a daughter, 10--have long since gone to sleep.

In bed, his eyes barely close before it’s time to get up again. A quick shave, shower and Hofmeister heads back to the Equestrian Center, where he will speak at 6 a.m. to the advanced students at his 6-month-old Los Angeles International Culinary Institute.

After the 3 1/2-hour lecture-demonstration in the institute’s classroom, he walks into the $1-million kitchen that serves both restaurants, where he will oversee the staff and students as they prepare that day’s lunches and then the evening meals.

The restaurants are meant to provide training and jobs for the students, and a cash flow for the institution’s operations, but that’s not enough for this man, referred to by staff and students as “The Chef.”

His goals, he said, include making a world-class cooking school of his institute, and a world-class reputation for his Classroom Restaurant.

Two factors make the odds against him formidable:

- The need to charge $13,500 for the institute’s 18-month, elite, professional class course with its all-new equipment and high-priced teaching talent.

- The bad karma of the two restaurants that have been a bone yard for the dreams of other restaurateurs who have tried their hand here, including Ma Maison’s Patrick Terrail.

Until a year ago, Hofmeister was the $100,000-plus-a-year executive chef at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City, with a staff of 140 to help him feed the monied multitudes. It was a gig, in culinary circles, much like the starring role in a runaway Broadway hit.

Now he is just another guy trying to build a new business--two new, interconnected businesses--during an economy that’s flatter than a half-baked souffle.

In spite of the temptation to say there’s nothing right with this picture, there is an intangible that mitigates what seems like professional suicide.

“Raimund Hofmeister is a man who can do what he has started out to do,” said Keith Keogh, executive chef of Epcot Center in Orlando, and president of the American Culinary Federation, the nation’s largest professional association of chefs, with 20,000 members.

Keogh said Hofmeister is a man with an extraordinary combination of business and artistic talents. It is an idea shared by his business partner, Sherry Hackett, wife of comedian Buddy, as well as the staff and students of his new school.

“Chef Hofmeister is a man of vision and ability, and very, very high standards. He is the reason most of the staff and students are here,” said teaching staff instructor chef John Collucci, formerly on the faculty of the Johnson & Wales Culinary Institute in Providence, R.I.

The American Culinary Federation certifies U.S. cooking schools and oversees a nationwide apprentice program for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For years, while at the Century Plaza, Hofmeister ran an apprentice program according to ACF guidelines.

“But some years ago, I decided I wanted to open a little cooking school that would turn out highly professional chefs, a school with a restaurant attached to it,” Hofmeister said. “It is just something I have always wanted to do.”

Hofmeister’s professional class is no place for people who want to learn a few recipes. The program teaches a range of culinary skills from menu planning and costing, to uniform slice and dicing, to butchering a steer.

Federation President Keogh said he has known Hofmeister for about five years, but that his reputation preceded him.

“I first heard of Raimund when he and his teams started winning everything in the international culinary competitions,” Keogh said. “For several years Ray helped mold the American teams into an unbeatable force.”

Hofmeister was a member of the U.S. team in the International Culinary Arts Competition in Osaka, Japan, and at the International Culinary Olympics in Frankfurt, Germany, both in 1984, Keogh said.

These competitions, which test food preparation and presentation, are judged by an internationally respected panel of experts and often include an opportunity for the chefs to cook for the public. Hofmeister said his groups often prepared as many as 200 meals in the American pavilions in one day.

Hofmeister was a member of the U.S. National Culinary Team that won the 1986 Culinary World Cup Competition in Luxembourg.

He then became team manager for the first American Culinary Federation Western Regional Culinary Team that competed in the 1988 Culinary Olympics Frankfurt, Germany.

Hofmeister’s success at these competitions and his outstanding record as a young executive chef at the Century Plaza made him something of a legend to people in the culinary trade, Keogh said.

Hofmeister is one of the country’s 50 cooks who have passed the three-day trials leading to the American Culinary Federation designation of master chef, and was named Chef of the Year in 1983 by the California Restaurant Writers Assn., and Chef of the Year in 1985 by the Chef de Cuisine Assn. of California.

He is highly respected by other top chefs in the nation, according to Brent Frei, editor of the National Culinary Review, published by the American Culinary Federation.

“He is recognized as a world-class chef by his peers who have routinely elected him to office in the federation,” Frei said of Hofmeister, who was recently elected to a second term as head of the federation’s Western area.

Born 42 years ago into a family of chefs and vintners in the wine country of Reinland Platz, Germany, Hofmeister began his apprenticeship at age 14 in the Black Forest resort of Baden-Baden.

He worked his way up through the food chain, from a vegetable chopper to kitchen king of all cuisine in restaurants from Switzerland to South Africa, before becoming the Wunderkind of the Westin Hotel chain.

For Westin, he worked in Atlanta, Detroit, Tulsa and Hawaii before being named, in 1979, executive chef of the Century Plaza Hotel at the age of 29, the youngest person to hold that position in its flagship hotel.

During his tenure, which lasted 12 years and an estimated 12 million meals, he and his staff of 140 provided all the hotel’s food, including the gourmet fare at the acclaimed La Chaumiere restaurant in the hotel’s Tower.

He and his crew also serviced the banquet rooms where Hofmeister’s charm and reputation brought in many of the town’s most important functions and--because he worked on a percentage of the take--a major upgrading of his already substantial salary.

Among those who dug into what he dished out were the Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix and Prince Klaus, Britain’s Prince Philip, President Ronald Reagan and comedian Buddy Hackett’s wife, Sherry.

“I was giving a huge benefit for suicide prevention in 1982 and my first thought, when I met with Raimund, was that he was much too young to be taking on this sort of challenge,” Hackett recalled. “After talking to him for a few moments, I changed my mind.”

Hackett said that Hofmeister, then and now, exudes the kind of confidence that comes from being a “successful perfectionist.

“You know he is a totally focused person who would have been a success at whatever he chose to do.”

After the suicide-prevention banquet, which Hackett describes as “perfection,” she and Hofmeister remained friendly and he, in the course of several social conversations, started telling her about his dream of opening a cooking school.

She was surprised that he would consider leaving his socially and professionally prize position to go through all the agonies of what, in effect, was starting a new business.

Convinced of his seriousness, she put him in touch with investment banker Richard Berger, and for three years the three of them scouted sites, made proposals, consulted architects and fought their way through the red-tape jungle, finally getting the school up and cooking in September.

There were times during the start-up when things did not look good, Hofmeister said, “but lots of things that are worth doing take effort and do not come easy.”

Why he left the acclamation and adulation of the Century Plaza to turn schoolmaster is a matter of peer speculation, but one of his admirers supposes that, since he had risen to the top of his profession so young, there were no challenges left in the commercial cooking field.

Hofmeister said a change of management and philosophy at the Century Plaza was one thing that helped him make his move toward teaching, but the plans for the school have been brewing in his mind for years.

Asked if he wants to turn the school into the Harvard of the culinary arts, he just smiled, saying he had enough on his plate, for now, getting the school and restaurants on solid footing.

“I am happy with the progress of my first professional class,” he said. “And I am very pleased that, after a pretty slow start, we are now getting a good lunch and dinner crowd in the restaurants.”

Asked if, after a really long day, he didn’t sometimes wish for the comforts of the Century Plaza, Hofmeister said he does miss the camaraderie of his former kitchen mates, but added, “I never look back, never ask myself if I made the right choice.”