Tours for the Thinking Person : Every Ritz Way to Cook : Deluxe food at bargain prices in a famed Paris hotel

Everyone knows there are few bargains left for Americans in Europe these days. The grand hotels, with their spacious suites and maids who come running at the push of a buzzer, are for super models and wealthy jet-setters. A room at the Hotel Ritz in Paris goes for $640 a night. Yet there I was, one rainy afternoon last March, nibbling on fillet of sole with champagne and chocolate tartlets for not much more than the cost of two glasses of Beaujolais in the hotel’s Hemingway bar.

Granted, my table was a folding chair set up in a kitchen in the hotel’s basement. And I didn’t consume a whole lunch or dinner--just a few delicate morsels of fish and a chocolate tart elegantly presented on bone china engraved with the blue, gold and white crest of the Ritz. But then I wasn’t a paying guest, either. I was a student-for-the-afternoon at the Ritz-Escoffier, the hotel’s cooking school, where $50 buys 2 1/2 hours of instruction in French gastronomy, with English translation, and a rare backdoor peak inside the kitchens and pantries of one of the world’s great hotels.

The Ritz-Escoffier, located in the basement across from the main hotel kitchens, opens to the public most afternoons and Saturday mornings for cooking demonstration classes with top French chefs. Anyone can sit in on the sessions, which are part of the regular curriculum for full-time Ritz-Escoffier students who pay $1,000 a week to earn a certificate or diploma from the school.

Going underground at the Ritz is a little like being invited into the crew’s quarters on a luxury cruise ship. When my husband and I stayed at the hotel for one night 10 years ago, we talked in whispers and tiptoed through hushed corridors lined with glass cases filled with expensive perfumes and jewels. Jackets and ties were required for men, and my husband Tom, put on both every time we left the room. Cooking school students showed up in sneakers, parkas and jeans, probably one reason we were told to enter the hotel not through the formal lobby on the swank Place Vendome, but through a service entrance in the back on the Rue Cambon.

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Unlike the formal lobby upstairs decorated with midnight-blue carpeting, overstuffed chairs and rich oil paintings, the basement of the Ritz looks like a basement, with concrete walls, blue tile floors and bright fluorescent lighting. The main kitchen, with its long stainless-steel counter, stove and overhead mirror for watching the chef’s moves, is a working kitchen. Bins are stocked with old wooden spoons and metal whisks just like the ones we have at home; copper pots hang on the walls within handy reach of the stove. Best of all, Jean-Louis Taillebaud, the school’s chef de cuisine and our teacher, lived up to my idea of a French chef. He wore thick black glasses, a tall white hat and starched jacket and proved himself part showman, part practical cook as he worked his way through a menu of soft-cooked eggs with olive tapenade, souffleed sole with champagne and warm chocolate tartlets. The dishes probably wouldn’t be served together in a restaurant. But for teaching purposes, they were perfect because they gave our chef the chance to demonstrate an array of cooking techniques--in this case, everything from the proper way to mix pastry dough to how to cut off the head of a fish.

As he dressed the sole with the truffles and asparagus, his assistant produced a vase with a single, white rose, a silver platter for the eggs and small white china plates. After 2 1/2 hours of watching Taillebaud cook, we were invited to taste his efforts. Silver spoons and white napkins emblazoned with the Ritz seal were passed around. He interjected a last voila as he floated one of the warm chocolate tartlets in a vanilla custard sauce.

Some amateur cooks make it a point to squeeze in a cooking class wherever they travel, and many schools have started offering scaled-down classes similar to those at the Ritz.

Le Cordon Bleu, perhaps the most famous cooking school in Paris, offers half-day courses and daily demonstrations and tastings on a variety of subjects throughout the year. The school also offers day tours of Paris markets on Fridays.

Another way to learn is with Marie-Blanche de Broglie, an acknowledged expert in French cuisine and entertaining, who offers a demonstration with chef Gerard Salle of the Plaza Athenee hotel, followed by lunch in her Paris apartment.

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GUIDEBOOK: Puttin’ on the Ritz

Where to cook: The Ritz-Escoffier presents an ongoing program of cooking and pastry-making demonstration classes for the public. Classes are held Monday through Thursday, 3-5:30 p.m., the last Saturday of the month from 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and the first and third Tuesday of the month from 7-9:30 p.m. Cost is $50. Classes are limited to 40 people. Major credit cards are accepted.

For a list of monthly menus, or to make a reservation contact the Ecole Ritz-Escoffier, 15 Place Vendome, 75001, Paris, France. From the United States, telephone (800) 966-5758, or 011-33- 1-4316-3050, fax 011-33-1-4316-3150. Reservations must be made no later than noon the same day for weekday classes and before 3 p.m. the day before Saturday demonstrations.

Daily demonstration classes are also offered at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, 8, Rue Leon-Delhomme, 75015, Paris, Monday through Friday at 9 a.m., and 1:30 and 4:30 p.m. Saturday classes are at 9:30 a.m. Cost is $45. Classes are in English. The school also offers day tours of Paris markets on Fridays from 9 a.m. to 4:40 p.m. Cost is $140. For reservations, tel. 011-33-1-5368-2250 or fax 011-33-1-4856-0396. From the U.S., tel. (800) 457-CHEF, or fax (914) 426-0104.

La Cuisine de Marie-Blanche, 18, Avenue de la Motte-Picquet, 75007, Paris, offers demonstrations followed by lunch for $145. tel. 011-33-1-4551-3634; fax: 011-33-1-4551-9019.

--C.P.