Culinary-school closure is a blow to Valley restaurants
On the school’s last Wednesday, before the final meal is served, before the kitchen lights dim out and the students walk out the door, the head chef is still cooking. The sound of rhythmic chopping echoes through the empty kitchen and the smell of roasted turkey fills that space.
Chef Jon-Paul Hutchins has spent half a lifetime in this school, molding students into talented young chefs.
“Pretty much anybody who’s anybody has come through this school at some point,” he says. So now, as the final days wind down, the end of June in sight, Hutchins prepares one more meal, the last to be served under this roof.
Today, Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute of Scottsdale shuts down for good, one of the last of 16 Cordon Bleu schools in the U.S. to go.
Hutchins described it simply as “a business decision,” a way for the Career Education Corp., which owns the rights to Le Cordon Bleu, to move classes strictly online and avoid the regulations involved in running the school. Altogether, the Illinois-based company is closing 89 schools.
But after three decades, the demise of the Scottsdale Culinary Institute, as the school is known, leaves a big void in the Valley. Already, fewer and fewer chefs are coming into the industry; a combination of long hours, low reward and meager pay makes the career a tough sell. With new restaurants popping up around Phoenix every week, having enough trained chefs to fill those positions has become a growing concern.
As the largest culinary school in the area, Scottsdale Culinary was a producer of the biggest pool of chefs for restaurateurs to choose from. Now, that’s slipping away.
When he arrived in Phoenix more than 25 years ago, Hutchins played a vital role in rewriting the school’s curriculum. He placed a focus on individualized education for every student. If they were interested in learning a skill, that’s the next thing he’d teach them.
Now, more than 100,000 students later, he’s saying his final goodbye.
Scottsdale Culinary Institute was founded in the mid-1980s by Elizabeth Leite, at a time when the restaurant and hospitality industry in Arizona was beginning to flourish. Big hotels and resorts were opening across the state as it became a popular tourist destination. With that came a need for workers, particularly chefs, to fill openings in the industry.
Back then, there was nowhere for chefs to be trained.
Hutchins was teaching in Manhattan when Leite invited him to Arizona to help her run the school. From there, it grew into a place that produced some of the best chefs in the Valley — chefs who have built Phoenix into more of food town than it ever had been.
One of them is chef Kevin Binkley, who graduated from Scottsdale Culinary in 1995. The James Beard Award fivetime nominee moved to Arizona to attend Arizona State University before deciding on culinary school instead.
“It didn’t seem like school,” he said. “You go in the mornings and learn how to cook and then eat what you made in the afternoon. It was like a dream come true.”
Binkley worries about where he’ll find well-educated culinary students now that the school is closed. A year ago, he managed 130 employees in four restaurants. Now, he has downsized to two restaurants, where he can focus on employees who are truly passionate about cooking. That’s a quality that has become harder to find too, he said.
“With less and less people going into it, you get the bottom of the barrel of students coming out,” the chef/owner of Binkley’s Restaurant lamented.
A major factor is the cost of attending culinary school compared with the payoff on the other side. In the ’90s, it cost $13,000 for the 15-month program at Scottsdale Culinary, but it took Binkley more than 10 years to pay off his student loans. He was making $6.75 out of school, working at a five-star restaurant.
Today, an associate degree from the school would cost around $38,000, which isn’t an uncommon price to pay for a quality culinary education. Except that the annual mean wage for chefs and head cooks is roughly $28,000 to $40,000 in Arizona, among the lowest salaries in the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the week before Scottsdale Culinary’s closing, there were about 20 students remaining. For the past 12 weeks, they’ve had the chance to be creative in the kitchen, working in groups to put together a four-course meal, which they serve to friends and family each week.
James Foster, who works as a chef at ASU when he’s not in school, said they were lucky to be able to complete their 21-month program.
“I have a lot of friends who want to come to this school and don’t get the chance,” he said.
Foster and his classmates have seen dozens of students drop out since the school announced its closing — they wouldn’t have been able to finish their degree, so why continue?
As students begin to clean up the kitchen, Sergio Silva hands Foster a sample of the milky green tea he had just made.
“Wow, this is gonna go so good with my boba,” Foster says, taking a second sip. The two are making a bubble-tealike drink for the next day.
Silva didn’t always plan on going to culinary school, and still isn’t sure he’ll stay with it forever. His dream is to pursue a career in the performing arts, but his passion for cooking, he realized, would be more sustainable.
“This is my paycheck and passport,” he said.
Foster takes another sample from a classmate — chocolate butter cake fresh from the oven. He looks around the room as he takes a bite.
“I don’t think you’re going to find another school like this,” he says.
As the day comes to a close and classmates clean up around her, Christine Chan is still focused on preparing rolls for today’s meal. She has separated the dough into perfectly proportioned pieces. She methodically rolls each one, brushes it with oil and folds one side over the other, before placing it on the baking sheet.
Chan is from Taiwan. She moved to the U.S. to study at ASU, and decided to attend culinary school afterward. Chan came to Scottsdale Culinary hoping for a degree in both culinary and pastry studies, but with the school closing, she had to choose just one.
She wants to be a chef, she says, but seems hesitant.
“It takes hard work to become a great chef,” she says, not looking up from her work.
Hutchins stands over his student as she rolls the last piece of dough.
“Where else would you go to learn this in the Valley?” Hutchins wonders aloud. Every restaurant in town has been touched by this school, he has said more than once. “And I don’t think it’ll ever happen again.”
The school closing doesn’t just impact how many chefs are coming into the workforce, but aspiring chefs, too.
Arizona’s Careers in Culinary Arts Program works with high-schoolers interested in a food career. C-CAP gives students cooking lessons, helping them hone their skills, and gives them the opportunity to earn scholarships.
Scottsdale Culinary played a big part in what C-CAP was able to accomplish.
“Le Cordon Bleu did a lot of mentoring, a lot of teaching in our program,” said director Jill Smith, who has led the non-profit for about 10 years.
The school hosted their scholarship competitions every year, and instructors like Hutchins would teach classes to the 150 high-school students who came through. The school awarded one or two full-ride scholarships to these students each year. This past year, Smith said, she had to move the competition to a local school and hold classes in her small professional kitchen while Scottsdale Culinary was in the process of shutting down.
“You always knew if they were involved, it would be a quality product,” Smith said.
There are remaining schools in the Valley that offer culinary programs, including the Arizona Culinary Institute, the Art Institute of Phoenix and Estrella Mountain Community College, which has a culinary-studies program.
Barbara Fenzl, founder of Les Gourmettes cooking school in Phoenix, suggests being an apprentice in a restaurant and working your way onto the line. You can avoid student debt while still getting experience.
“Culinary school gives you the basics,” the veteran instructor said, “but if you just want to be creative and cook, a lot of the chefs will take you under their wing. You learn from them and you see what the real world is like.”