At a Career Crossroads? Try the Kitchen

The first thing Stacy Anderson did when he was laid off as a long-distance operator for AT&T; was switch phone companies--a bitter little serving of revenge that left him feeling oddly satisfied.

The second thing the lanky 33-year-old Fresno man did was far riskier, far more difficult and a lot more fun. He applied to chef school.

Today, Anderson attends the California Culinary Academy here. He has mastered knife skills after days spent slicing slabs of aspic into various tiny vegetable shapes, is a whiz at kitchen sanitation, and calls his partner back home regularly via Sprint.

Decked out in paper toque and checked chef pants, Stacy Anderson is a happy man. Even though:

a) In his first job as a chef, he will probably take a 30% pay cut from his $32,000 annual phone operator’s salary.

b) A 9-to-5 job in the food service industry is actually more like 3 to 11 p.m., weekends included.

c) Everyone told him he was making a mistake.

“I put up a wall. I didn’t want to hear it,” he says. “I’ve experienced some stress, but. . . . “ His voice trails off. He shrugs. He smiles. Need he say more? Well, maybe one thing: “This is definitely the best career move I could have made.”

Money aside, Anderson is on to something.

America’s infatuation with food has intersected with the corporate world’s love affair with downsizing, the coronation of the chef as celebrity, and the overworked family’s exodus from the home kitchen. The result is a bigger helping of all things culinary: schools, jobs, chefs, restaurants, Web sites, cookbooks, television shows.

A quarter of the nation’s nearly 300 chef schools have sprung up since the late 1980s, when big business began bleeding corporate jobs at a rate of more than a million a year.

While such programs have been inundated with applicants from all walks of life, culinary schools figure that gray-haired life-changers account for up to 60% of the student body.

Graduates see nothing but opportunity before them in one of the fastest-growing industries in America. Elite programs such as CCA, the Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Culinary Institute of America, and the Johnson & Wales University system, based in Rhode Island, field an average of six to seven job possibilities for every chef and baker they graduate.

More chef schools are being planned --at least three for California over the next three years--and neither the government nor the food service industry sees any cooling in the need for well-trained kitchen professionals.

The jobs are in cooking and baking positions everywhere from upscale restaurants to national chains, from neighborhood bakeries to research labs, hotels and other institutions. Graduates also find employment as restaurant managers, manufacturers representatives, teachers and writers.

“You can’t keep up,” says John Yena, president of the Johnson & Wales University system, which includes several culinary school campuses in areas as far flung as Miami and Vail, Colo. “It’s going gangbusters. . . . We have for the last 16 years placed 98% of our graduates [in culinary jobs] within 60 days of graduation. By 2001, we’re raising the bar--75% placement 60 days before graduation and 100% by graduation. It’s possible.”

Keith Keogh, president of CCA, just opened a second campus in Salinas and has hopes for another in San Diego this year and in Los Angeles the next. “I plan to grow enough to help the industry with its shortfall of chefs,” he says. “I’ll expand us as far to the east as I can, and that includes outside the boundaries of the country.”

Today, California has 29 professional programs, with the best known clustered in the north.

Cooking, Pastry and ‘Baking Math’

At 7 a.m. in the Napa Valley, fog clings to the bright green hillsides, lifting slowly from the seven-tiered herb garden at the Culinary Institute of America’s West Coast campus--a renovated 19th century winery of imposing gray tufa stone at the far edge of bucolic St. Helena.

Inside, 20 would-be bakers and pastry chefs, resplendent in crisp, white chef jackets, are initiated into the mysteries of the kitchen. It’s a slow start, Day 2 of cooking school, Day 1 of “Baking Math.”

Lesson No. 1 from chef-instructor Robert Jorin, ever practical, ever optimistic: “Math is a framework for analysis and discovery, and the best discovery in the food business is that you make money.”

Then he’s off, down the road to fractions and decimals, whole numbers and negatives, Fahrenheit and Celsius. It is just the first stretch of a rigorous, 30-week baking program. Next comes food science, then sanitation. Weeks will pass before these prospective purveyors of popovers and puff pastry get anywhere near a bag of flour.

On the way, they will learn about the vagaries of the marketplace and the hierarchy of the kitchen. They will find out about the opportunities--large--and the remuneration--small to begin with.

But the bottom line, Jorin tells his class, is that there are jobs, and you can have them. You, McArthur Thomas, 50 years old and newly laid off from a teaching position in Washington, D.C., can have a new life. You, Elizabeth La Vigne, 48, art teacher turned loan officer, can embark upon yet another career.

But chances are, Jorin continues, you’ll start at $7 to $8 an hour--this after paying $13,000 for the baking program at CIA. Many years and many kitchens can separate you from the executive chef’s salary of $80,000.

Stiff and attentive in the back of the bright lecture room, Thomas raises his hand: “That’s sort of discouraging.”

“I know it’s discouraging,” Jorin soothes. “Someone getting into this industry at a later age, you rise up faster than someone coming here for the first time out of high school. . . . They’ll start you at $7 to $8, but you’ll be the first person to go up.”

It’s a good thing. Thomas is working with the school’s administration on how to finance such a tony tuition. He still has a home back in Washington, a mortgage. In St. Helena he rents a room. He has no phone.

But he has big dreams, a bed and breakfast inn in Jamaica that he has already started with a partner. Someday, a bustling pastry shop on just the right busy D.C. intersection.

“It was a rude awakening,” says Thomas of his new life’s beginning. “One day I have a good government job. And the next day I’m out. At 50, what am I gonna do? I figure I have 20 or more years in me. . . . I’ve always baked. I thought pastries would be my way out.”

Not all refugees to chef school were kicked out of their earlier lives; many new toque wearers burned out of bad jobs--or first careers that were the wrong choices.

Rick Bean, 34, got tired of selling men’s furnishings at the Robinsons store in Del Amo Fashion Square in Torrance. After his company’s metamorphosis into Robinsons-May, he worried about the health of a future peddling belts and wallets.

So he went back to college, got his bachelor’s degree but ended up back in the men’s department before getting up the courage and the cash to move on. “I knew I didn’t want to continue in retail,” he says. “The monotony!”

Besides, he makes a mean blueberry cobbler, wants to cook in a hotel and write about food. So he saved and borrowed money--a lot of money--and made his way to CCA and its 18-month, $27,000 culinary arts degree program.

Pamela Bollinger, 50, vividly remembers her career change decision, made while stuck in a 90-minute traffic jam en route to a job she didn’t particularly like as an executive assistant at a pharmaceutical company. “I did a lot of soul searching in the car,” she says. “I decided I might as well do what I loved.”

But the sacrifice involved in CCA’s 30-week, $12,000 baking program is rarely far from Bollinger’s mind. She and her husband leased the house they had just built in Half Moon Bay and moved back with her parents and grandmother, renting a room in their San Mateo home.

She will graduate in April, passionate and prepared: “I’ll have to say this is the hardest work I’ve ever done. But I love it. I feel whole.”

The flood of would-be chefs like Bean and Bollinger is caused in part by changes in the American work life. Stacy Anderson, for example, had one of the more than 30,000 AT&T; jobs lost last year through layoffs, buyouts and attrition.

He came to San Francisco’s main culinary school with a severance package that helped with tuition, backed by a generous partner, pushed by a lifelong passion for food, and buoyed with the promise of work after graduation.

More than a third of the nation’s cooking schools say at least 10% of their students are 45 or older. Although they are seeing more second-career students, the schools still instruct large numbers of their traditional pupils: the college-age with a love of food, and current food service workers with a desire to learn more.

Most of America’s cooking programs boast huge employment rates for their graduates--more than 90% are working in their chosen field within six months of completing the programs.

At the New York Restaurant School in SoHo, about 60% of the student body is embarked on a second career. Nowhere is this phenomenon clearer than the school’s overnight program, which began as continuing education for people already in the food business. The classes, offered from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. four nights a week, have been overtaken by career-changers.

“It turned into something else that we weren’t expecting because of large downsizing and layoffs,” said Stephen Tave, director of admissions. Overnight classes allow couples with children not to have to worry about child care while one partner works and the other goes to school.

NYRS is part of Education Management Corp., which opened its first culinary arts program five years ago in Atlanta. Today, it owns eight chef schools, has poured $9 million into its culinary programs in the last three years, and is considering a chef school in Los Angeles.

“There are multiple job opportunities for every graduate,” said Robert B. Knutson, Education Management’s chairman and chief executive. “It seems as though the tendency for people to eat out and have less time for cooking is a trend that will be in place for a while. We would not be investing as we are if we felt otherwise.”

Entrance requirements vary, with some schools demanding food industry experience, and tuition can range from a few thousand dollars to upward of $30,000 for the most prestigious. As the number of applicants has spiraled, most schools find that they can be pickier about who they admit. Still, would-be cooks are likely to find a slot somewhere.

The National Restaurant Assn. estimates that 1.5 million new restaurant jobs will be created by 2005. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the food service industry is the fourth fastest growing in the country--after education, personnel supply services (also known as temp agencies) and miscellaneous business services.

The average American eats out four times a week--a historic high--and grocery chains increasingly offer what the industry nicely refers to as “home meal replacements.”

Somebody has to cook all this food, and it’s not us.

Ironically, while busy Americans are leaving their kitchens in droves, they are still fascinated by what they eat. Cookbook sales have grown dramatically--60% between 1991 and 1995.

Three years ago the Television Food Network launched a 24-hour-a-day cable food station with 6 million subscribers; about 24 million now pay for such network offerings as the “Julia-thon,” 19 1/2 solid hours of chirpy Chef Child, the doyenne of the dining room.

Food as Entertainment

“Food is not just something to eat anymore. Food is something to be entertained by,” says network President Erica Gruen, who calls her stars “entertainers with spoons.”

“Baby boomers have left sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and have gone to food for their drug of choice,” she says. “They don’t have the energy for those other things, and food is safer.”

Keogh of the California Culinary Academy credits the boom in television chefs--beginning in the late 1980s--with making the career both accessible and glamorous.

“All of a sudden everybody started doing TV programs,” says Keogh, whose school put out two seasons of “Cooking at the Academy” in concert with KQED, San Francisco’s public television station. “It was the greatest thing to happen. It started demystifying the whole chef trade.”

But relatively few chef jobs are in tony restaurants such as Stars, Chez Panisse and Campanile. In fact, Keogh figures that the greatest growth for trained chefs will be in product development and grocery chains, which are hiring chefs to design and lead their takeout offerings, a.k.a. “home meal replacements.”

Wherever the newly minted chefs land, most schools warn that the trade is not for everyone. At CCA, the first person to tell you that is Patti Heimerl, an admissions representative.

Heimerl is herself a chef school graduate, leaving behind a career in banking and investment company operations to fulfill her culinary dreams. She saved for two years, loved the 18-month program, and helped open a medium-size restaurant in San Francisco called the Meeting House. She quit after five months in the kitchen.

She loved the work but couldn’t live on the wages--$8 an hour, with no benefits. She took a second job selling cookware at Williams Sonoma to make ends meet.

“I worked seven days a week,” she said. “That doesn’t help the old social life at all. I was getting tired.”

So now Heimerl counsels prospective students, a 9-to-5 job just like “the rest of humanity.” Someday, she sees herself working in a winery, using the skills and knowledge she gained doing public relations.

She is out of the kitchen, but not out of the business.

“I have never been in a career that has given me better organizational skills,” she says. “I loved that. And the immediate gratification. There’s an energy in the kitchen. There is no other industry that I’ve been in or know about that gives you that same rush and that same gratification.”