North Hills : Culinary Student Gets His Just Desserts

This is what 18-year-old Billy Cayton of North Hills, who recently won a scholarship to a prestigious California culinary arts academy, would prepare for someone he wanted to impress:

Salad: apple mushroom ragout. Soup: chicken consomme. Entree: breast of chicken stuffed with spinach and cheese, wrapped in foil, poached, grilled and sliced, served over linguine.

Don’t even ask about dessert. He’d do a three-layer chocolate thing with strawberry and vanilla mousse, with a shake of cinnamon and fresh berries.

Cayton started taking classes at Mission College’s culinary arts program while still in high school. The hard work paid off. He recently won a $24,000 scholarship to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco.

Cayton said he worked with Raimund Hofmeister, director of the Los Angeles Culinary Institute in Burbank, in a tough apprentice program that helped him develop his culinary skills.

Cayton credits Hofmeister and Rudy Garcia, director of Mission College’s culinary arts training program, for pushing him hard to succeed, urging him to practice and do free-lance catering work.

“I’d stay late at school, then cook for people at parties, then go and study hard,” Cayton said. “I really drove myself, but my parents, my sister, Chef Garcia and Chef Hofmeister, everybody’s been pushing and helping me.”

Cayton said he would have continued his culinary education at Mission if he hadn’t won the scholarship.

“There are a lot of impressive people in the Mission program, and they all have different cultures and different culinary specialties. It’s part of what makes the program work so well,” he said.