Le Cordon Bleu ends, but other schools heat up
The last remaining vestige of what was once San Francisco’s top cooking school will pack up its saute pans and close its doors for good at the end of September.
Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in San Francisco — previously the California Culinary Academy, the training ground for a generation of Bay Area chefs in the late 20th century — is closing along with the 15 other U.S. locations of Paris-based Le Cordon Bleu schools operated by Career Education Corp.
When the last Le Cordon Bleu students complete the program Sept. 29, it will certainly be the end of an era. Yet other local cooking schools are thriving in its wake, with at least eight private institutions and community colleges running professional culinary programs in the Bay Area. Administrators of those schools say enrollment is robust, whether it’s the free culinary basic skills training offered at City College of San Francisco or the $68,000
degree program at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena.
“It’s going to have an impact,” said Tom Bensel, managing director of the Culinary Institute’s California campus, about the Le Cordon Bleu closure. The CIA’s St. Helena branch regularly has 250 to 280 students in its professional training program, and the school recently opened an additional public-facing facility at Copia in downtown Napa. “You’re starting to see some of the smaller community colleges really step up their culinary programs.”
In December 2015, Career Education Corp. announced that it would close all U.S. branches of Le Cordon Bleu by this month, citing operating losses of more than $110 million in the previous nine months and the inability to find a suitable buyer as the reasons for the closure. The company, which only operates the U.S. division of Le Cordon Bleu, declined to comment further when reached for this story.
In recent years, the culinary school model has shifted in many ways, with many graduates no longer seeing restaurant jobs as the only outcome of a culinary degree, and fewer students coming straight out of high school into cooking school boot camp just to prepare for a lifetime of restaurant jobs. Programs are now expanding their reach, too, beyond a traditional Francophile direction; the International Culinary Center (originally called the French Culinary Institute) branch in Campbell even offers culinary training with a farm-to-table emphasis.
Bensel said only 50 percent of students say they plan to work in restaurants after school.
“The other 50 percent look to do other things in the hospitality and food world,” he said, such as food science, food manufacturing, media, hotel management or wine and beverages.
At the 5-year-old San Francisco Cooking School, founder Jodi Liano said most of her students have some college, graduate school or work experience before enrolling. She said 70 percent of the most recent class of students said they wanted to enter the restaurant industry, while the others have ended up working as private chefs, in test kitchens or as writers and recipe developers for companies like Sun Basket, which delivers meal kits to homes.
“Because those types of opportunities have grown so much over the past couple of years, that’s coincided with us seeing a lot of those people,” said Liano.
City College’s hotel and restaurant program has seen a 50 percent increase in signups from last year, said department chair Tannis Reinhertz. That partly has to do with low enrollment in the past few years, following the college’s accreditation crisis, but Reinhertz said many of her students are already experienced restaurant workers who want to expand their skills. (Plus, all classes are currently free to San Francisco residents.)
“They want a deeper knowledge,” said Reinhertz. “They want to learn culinary math, they want to learn purchasing, they want to learn more about wine.”
City College’s program has long been the workaday alternative to the flashier California Culinary Academy, which was founded in 1977. In the California Culinary Academy’s heyday during the ’80s and ’90s, it had 2,000 students and filled a grandiose building on Polk Street that attracted a society set to its student-run Careme Room restaurant. Alums include Ron Siegel of Madcap in San Anselmo — the first American to win Iron Chef — and Michelle Mah of the Slanted Door. Jeremiah Tower even taught there briefly.
Its downfall seemed to happen gradually after Career Education Corp. bought the school in 1999. In 2007, the school was the subject of a class-action lawsuit by former students who claimed administrators were misleading about graduates’ career prospects as students sank themselves in debt in order to attend. Enrollment dropped, and in 2008 Career Education Corp. closed the Polk street location, moving all classes to its new Potrero Hill campus.
Though Liano said she founded her smaller school as an antidote to traditional cooking programs like Le Cordon Bleu, she still feels the loss of the school’s closure.
“It’s so sad to me,” said Liano. “Given how many amazing chefs in this city graduated from that program many years ago — that old guard from the culinary academy. There are a lot of great people who got so much out of that program. It was sad to see how it ended up.”