Chef Plots New Course : Food: Raimund Hofmeister left the L.A. Equestrian Center after a business fiasco. The culinary school founder is working on a new recipe for success.

Award-winning chef Raimund Hofmeister is sampling a new dish.

But he will never put it on his menu. It’s too bitter.

“I had known nothing but success,” Hofmeister said, relaxing outside his office at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank. The interior of the glass-walled office was lined with reminders of that success, an array of cooking awards and pictures of the mustachioed Hofmeister in his tall, white toque, flanked by politicians and celebrities.

“Nothing but success,” the German-born chef repeated in his softly inflected English.

That was until he decided to leave a lucrative position as executive chef at the Century Plaza Hotel and Tower to go into business for himself.

In the teeth of a recession that was hitting the food preparation industry especially hard in late 1991, he founded the Los Angeles International Culinary Institute, a professional cooking school charging $15,500 for 18 months of instruction. He also established two restaurants at the equestrian center where the students could practice their art.

Last month, the Classroom restaurant and the Equestrian Bar & Grill shut their doors when Hofmeister’s partners pulled out, saying they had lost all the money they could afford, forcing Hofmeister to temporarily suspend classes. So on a recent sunbaked morning, while men and women in jeans walked their horses outside, Hofmeister sat at a bare table in the shuttered Classroom, thinking about his mistakes.

“I take part of the blame,” said the 43-year-old chef. “To build a school, we took an aggressive stand. We wanted to have the best of everything right away.”

No matter what the cost.

He hired a maitre d’ and a sommelier, reasoning that the students needed wine instruction. The restaurants bled green, losing as much as $100,000 in a month.

“Going through this experience,” Hofmeister sighed, “I first felt like laying down and not getting up.”

But a man with a portrait of Vince Lombardi on his wall, titled “What It Takes To Be No. 1,” does not give up easily. So rather than return to a kitchen as chef, he has moved the school to a bakery on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, where classes resumed about 10 days ago.

He also is hatching plans to eventually reopen both restaurants at the equestrian center, despite the facility’s growing reputation as a place where restaurants break down more often than swaybacked horses.

One of the first and most spectacular failures there occurred when Patrick Terrail, founder of the celebrity hangout Ma Maison in West Hollywood, was hired in 1983 to manage the Riding and Polo Club restaurant.

Terrail served chilled champagne and Ma Maison box lunches at horse shows. Center officials said he lost $500,000 in five months, which Terrail denied. He left in 1984.

The center itself, which opened in 1981 on 70 acres of city property in Griffith Park, has frequently been troubled. Despite its reputation as one of the finest riding facilities in the nation, with 50 miles of trails, the center was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1985. In 1989, 30 people from the center’s restaurant were laid off and the polo school was closed to stem losses of $1 million a year.

Hofmeister, who opened the school and the restaurant and grill last September, said he came closer than anyone else to making a go of it. “We had more business than any other operator before us,” he said.

Sunday brunches were popular, and the food was praised by critics. Unfortunately, not enough people from outside the horsy set rode up for the international vittles Hofmeister was serving, such as swordfish smeared with olive puree and salads tossed with feta cheese and slices of baby lamb.

Ken Mowry, the center’s general manager, said the facility remains supportive of Hofmeister as he struggles to find new investors and reopen the restaurants.

Hofmeister was born into a family of chefs and vintners in the German wine country and began his apprenticeship at 14. He worked his way up from vegetable chopper to head of the kitchen in restaurants from Switzerland to South Africa before landing an executive position with the Westin Hotel chain in America.

In 1979, he was named executive chef at the Century Plaza, at 29 the youngest person ever to attain that position. He headed a staff of 140, which provided all of the hotel’s food, including the meals at the acclaimed La Chaumiere restaurant in the hotel tower.

“I first heard of Raimund when he and his teams started winning everything in the international culinary competitions,” Keith Keogh, executive chef at Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla., told The Times earlier this year. Keogh said Hofmeister helped build the American teams into an “unbeatable force.”

Hofmeister was a member of the National Culinary Team that won the 1986 Culinary World Cup competition in Luxembourg. He has cooked for the Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix and Prince Klaus, Britain’s Prince Philip, President Ronald Reagan, and, fatefully, comedian Buddy Hackett’s wife, Sherry.

They met at a banquet in 1982 and became friendly. Over the years, he discussed with her his dream of opening a cooking school. She was surprised that he would leave his high-profile position, but had no doubt that he could make the school work.

Hackett brought in investment banker Richard Berger, and the three of them scouted locations for three years before finally opening the school.

The school grew quickly. There were 11 students in the first class, with more waiting for spots in classes that began a few months later. Students also were signing up for his entry-level, three-month course costing $2,800, designed for those considering a career change.

But Hofmeister now believes he should have waited until he had 120 students enrolled before embarking on ambitious plans for two full-service restaurants that required heavy investments in equipment and personnel.

The general economic climate made it all the more difficult to succeed.

“We had everything the restaurant business cannot use,” he said. “There was drought, earthquakes, floods, riots.”

Hofmeister expected to lose money for a year, but the losses in the beginning were far heavier than expected. He had always worked long days. Now, with his dream collapsing around him, he pushed himself to a numbing 20-hour-a-day schedule.

Finally, in early June, the patience of partners Hackett and Berger wore out. They refused to invest any more money.

Hofmeister was crushed. “I’m convinced we were six weeks from breaking even,” he said. “I can’t blame my partners for not putting more money in. I could have controlled costs better.”

Hackett agreed that more attention should have been paid to the bottom line. But what made Hofmeister a great chef, his stubborn perfectionism and artist’s temperament, made him reluctant to compromise on his plans for a first-rate dining establishment, she said. All she would say when asked how much money she lost was, “A lot!”

“I wish him the best. He’s a very talented person,” Hackett said.

Most of Hofmeister’s students are staying with him. “I don’t blame him,” said Darrin Aoyama, 25, of Rolling Hills Estates. “A lot of us appreciated the four weeks off. This school is really intense.”

Sitting alone in the forlorn-looking restaurant, his $1-million kitchen of gleaming gray steel looking like a mothballed battleship, Hofmeister said the failure hit him hard. “At first, I wanted to put my head in the sand.”

But now, he has regained his confidence. He says the school is growing with new enrollments and he is excited about the bakery. He stumbled upon the closed-up Swiss Bakery, called the owner and told him he had no money but did have a reputation and a viable cooking school. The bakery was opened to the public last Monday. Some classes will still be held at the equestrian center, even though there will be no customers there to eat what the students cook.

“Sometimes bad things happen for the better,” Hofmeister said.

That might sound like watching your yacht sink and being thankful for the life preserver, but Hofmeister believes the bakery will be the base from which to rebuild everything.

This time, he will go slower. If he can’t find investors, he is prepared to wait a few months longer, until enrollment alone will support at least one restaurant.

He is still thinking big, however, planning to open a bookstore next door to the bakery. Asked how he would pay for it, he replied: “Mortgage my house, again.”