Changing face of culinary school
Grads are ready for restaurant work but get lured to cushier food jobs
Nearly five years ago, Jodi Liano cold-called Daniel Patterson.
At the time, Liano was a teacher at Tante Marie’s Cooking School, a program aimed at home cooks. Yet she was beginning to see an opportunity in San Francisco for a different type of culinary school; one that would ready students for the restaurant kitchen. In an effort to build an advisory board and help develop the appropriate curriculum, she started contacting local chefs. Patterson, the owner of Coi on Broadway, was first on her list. He was quick to shut her down. Liano still remembers his words: “He said, ‘I didn’t go to cooking school. I tell everyone they shouldn’t go to cooking school. I tell everyone it’s a waste of time and money.’ ”
In what was perhaps an unexpected response, she agreed: “Well, so do I. And that’s exactly why you’re the person I want to talk to.”
Almost 12 months after that first conversation, Liano opened the doors of San Francisco Cooking School. Patterson was one of its deans, along with Craig Stoll of Delfina and Bill Corbett, then at Absinthe.
Nearly four years later, the school has, in many ways, achieved its initial goal: It has become a fixture in the restaurant and food community, a conduit between aspiring cooks and the businesses that crave them.
Yet an unforeseen conundrum has materialized. On the one hand, Liano’s program has stayed true to its mission of giving cooks a restaurant-focused education they won’t necessarily find elsewhere. (Many chefs say her students are better prepared than any other entry-level cook.)
On the other hand, the school’s Bay Area location means that Liano is consistently churning out graduates who are finding culinaryfocused careers elsewhere — away from the restaurant world.
From recipe development jobs at fledgling meal-kit companies to daytime cooking gigs in corporate cafeterias, the culinary program has — almost by default — become as much a feeder into a growing big-business and food-tech industry as it has into the restaurant world.
“Food as a career used to be Plan B,” says Liano. The average age of a San Francisco Cooking School student is mid to late twenties, though she sees a full range.
In the beginning, Liano sat in a room with the deans and her advisory board — a dozen more members of the restaurant community — and brainstormed better ways to train a cook. At more traditional schools, students might get a fancy education that includes how to carve a tomato rose, but they’re not necessarily prepared for restaurant work. They’ll be in debt either way — the six-month program at S.F. Cooking School is just under $30,000 as compared to upwards of $50,000 for year-long programs — but here, the hope was that they’d be ready for restaurant work from day one.
“Our list was massive,” Liano says. “Everything from fundamental technical skills to ‘I wish they could fix the dishwasher’ and ‘I wish they spoke fluent Spanish.’ ”
Obviously, the school couldn’t do it all. Liano chose to focus on a pain point that chefs brought up repeatedly.
“I kept hearing this idea that people walk into a restaurant kitchen and they don’t ‘get it,’ ” Liano recalls, explaining that the chefs weren’t necessarily concerned with people’s technical skills — those could be taught or fixed. But new cooks didn’t know how to stay focused on the details. They didn’t know how to listen or when to stop talking. They didn’t know the right questions to ask.
Liano built the curriculum accordingly — teaching students how to cook with the feel of a restaurant kitchen. Cases of chickens are boned in one sitting, for example; molecular gastronomy is purposely left out. Plus, no matter what path students choose, the program requires a mandatory two-month restaurant externship in order to graduate, with almost no exceptions.
Cooking school has often been considered a means to an end for high school graduates who like to work with food and who see the restaurant industry as one where jobs will always be available. In the Bay Area — and in competing Bay Area culinary schools like the soon-to-close Le Cordon Bleu and the program at City College of San Francisco — that’s certainly true, although Liano says that culinary careers have now become Plan A — a path for those who have been to college or have had life experience in a more business-oriented field.
“This school is really a bridge for people who are transforming their career,” she says.
But what does that mean for the restaurants who eagerly await her alums?
Melissa Perello, chef-owner of both Frances and Octavia in San Francisco, takes externs from Liano’s program and confirms that they have the right training. But she laments that it’s nearly impossible to keep them once they’ve taken turns in her kitchen. The
prospectstyle elsewhereof an easier cooking lifeprovesproves too hard to pass up.
“It can be really frustrating,” says Perello. One recent graduate worked a year in the Frances kitchning en before an opening the Wilst liams-Sonoma test kitchen lured her away.
And Liano understands it. She, too, chose a teaching path over restaurant life. Still, she feels the pain of the restaurants.
Still, her allegiance is to the students. And she believes it’s imy portant that they know about othnt er, non-restaurant opportunities. That means bringing in people like Matt Cohen from Off The Grid to speak about what it means to have a food truck, or Minh Tsai from Hodo Soy Beanery to educate stusays
“It’s not unlike when you look at Google or Facebook and they’re complaining that they can’t hire engineers because these sexy startups are headhunting people and offering sexy packages.” Jodi Liano, San Francisco Cooking School founder
dents on starting a food business. Taylor Boetticher from Fatted Calf will do a butchery demonstration, and author Kate Leahy will discuss how she writes a cookbook with a chef.
“They start to realize that there’s other stuff out there,” Liano says.
Mandy Miller was one such student, a former information-technology project manager in corporate America who was implementing accounting and reporting systems. After 10 years, she realized her passion was in the kitchen, and she did her due diligence to find the right place to learn the craft.
“What spoke to me about S.F. Cooking School was that they didn’t stress that you have to go work in a restaurant or bakery,” Miller. “They made me realize that there are other careers and jobs you can pursue in the culinary world that aren’t restaurant jobs.”
After an externship at Commonwealth, a restaurant in the Mission, Miller worked part time there while spending the other half of the week trying other jobs: a recipe tester for a gluten-free magazine, a gig working for a small granola business, a turn at a bakery and working as a food stylist. It was the last one that ultimately landed her a full-time position as a food specialist at Hampton Creek, the tech company known for its “eggless mayonnaise.” There, Miller works on recipe videos for the company’s social media platforms.
“It’s a dream job,” says Miller, who loves the work but also that it’s essentially a 9-to-5 job that includes good benefits and more money than she would have received had she pursued a long-term career behind the kitchen stoves.
“It’s not unlike when you look at Google or Facebook and they’re complaining that they can’t hire engineers because these sexy startups are headhunting people and offering sexy packages,” says Liano. “It’s a marketplace issue, where there’s so many other career opportunities in food, restaurants have to be really competitive. It’s difficult.”
Still, she’s standing firm on her original goal to train the line cook, and filtering her graduates through Bay Area restaurants.
“Most of these companies say that the best employees they have come in having spent some time in a restaurant,” says Liano. “They do their jobs better because they understand the pressure. That applies to any kitchen.”