At California’s Cooking School, the Plate’s Full of Opportunities : Food: With 600 chefs-in-training, the Culinary Academy in San Francisco is bursting at the seams. It plans to add a Southland outpost soon.

Something’s cooking at the California Culinary Academy, and it’s not just the succulent dishes its students create.

The academy, one of the nation’s most successful and prestigious cooking schools, is expanding to feed a seemingly insatiable appetite for trained chefs and fine amateur cooking.

“Our biggest dilemma on a day-to-day basis is what opportunities to work on that day. The plate’s full,” said Theodore G. Crocker, chairman of the board of the California Culinary Academy Inc.

The academy, housed in a stately 1912 building in downtown San Francisco, has graduated more than 3,000 students since it was founded in 1977. Along with the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and the Johnson & Wales school in Providence, R.I., the California Culinary Academy is considered one of the nation’s top cooking schools.

But with 600 full-time students in its professional training program and hundreds more taking avocational and continuing education courses, the academy is bursting at the seams.

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So the school is remodeling to absorb 100 more full-time students and plans to open a branch with a television production kitchen, retail shop and restaurant near Fisherman’s Wharf. Both projects are expected to be completed by year’s end. The academy also is looking to license its distinguished name for kitchen tools and small appliances.

And it’s seeking a spot in Southern California, where it hopes to start a second school in early 1994.

“Beyond that, we’re looking into moving fairly quickly into other states” and into other countries, most likely in the Pacific Rim, Crocker said.

The current expansion is being funded by the $6.5 million the debt-free academy raised in its recently completed initial public offering. The school is believed to be the only one of its kind to be publicly traded.

Profits rose 147% to $336,000, or 16 cents a share, for the third quarter ended May 31, from $136,000, or 7 cents a share, for the same period last year. Revenues rose 17% to $2.9 million from $2.5 million.

The academy is best known for its 1991 television show, “Cooking at the Academy.” The 13-part series was “the hottest and most savory TV cooking show” of the year, proclaimed Time magazine.

The program, produced with San Francisco public television station KQED, eschewed wisecracking celebrity chefs. Instead, academy teachers gave clear, straightforward instruction ranging from simmering soup stock to making plates delectable to the eye as well as the palate.

It was watched by 7 million people each week on 95% of the nation’s PBS stations and in Britain, New Zealand and Australia. A second series is in the works.

The academy also has published more than 30 cookbooks, selling 2 million copies since 1985. For those more interested in consumption than creation, the school has two popular restaurants, a cozy grill and an elegant dining room surrounded by glassed-in student kitchens.

But professional training, an intensive 18-month course, remains the academy’s core business and chief moneymaker.

Students spend seven hours a day, five days a week in classroom and kitchen, learning the art and business of classical cooking. They start with such basics as proper use of a knife and essential sauces, progress through food chemistry and controlling costs to adorning buffets and the sweet science of pastry.

“One of the things I keep telling people--and it’s kind of a cliche around here--is our goal is to be able to blindfold graduates . . . take them anywhere in the world and take off that blindfold, and they should be able to start cooking,” said Thomas A. Bloom, the academy’s president and chief executive officer.

“When they walk through here, they know everything about an artichoke that there is to know--but we also tell them how to make money with that artichoke,” he said.

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All this training isn’t cheap. Tuition is $22,500, not including more than $700 for a supply kit: uniforms, towels, traditional tall pleated hats, books, knives and other tools.

But graduates are virtually assured of work. The academy says 88% find jobs within six months of graduation, with an average salary of $24,000. That’s comparable with the starting pay of college graduates, according to the Department of Education.

Graduates are cashing in on the rapid growth in the food service industry. The National Restaurant Assn. estimates that demand for cooks, excluding fast food, will increase 22% by the year 2000. And there’s growing demand for trained cooks as caterers, restaurant managers, consultants and “food stylists”--artists who arrange food tastefully for the camera.

Meanwhile, the layman’s craving for culinary knowledge is filling the academy’s continuing education courses. About 12,000 people--both hobbyists and professionals seeking new skills--have taken the Saturday classes in the four years they have been offered.

“It’s like an avalanche,” Crocker said. “It’s not just like a snowball down a hill. It is running at a tremendous pace.”