Many culinary school graduates ultimately pursue careers in the service industry besides cooking. They might work as restaurant managers, concierges, wine professionals or for a restaurant group in a corporate setting. However, most of these roles either don't require a culinary school degree or are equally accessible with traditional undergraduate degrees in hospitality or business management. Find jobs. Company reviews. Find salaries. Upload your resume. Sign in. Finding a Job.
What is culinary school? Culinary arts certificate programs: Many culinary schools last between six months and a year and focus only on cooking skills and practices. Attendees finish with a certificate or diploma in culinary or baking in pastry arts.
Associate degree programs: Some culinary schools offer associate degree programs in culinary or baking and pastry arts that allow students to further develop their cooking skills while studying basic business subjects. These programs usually last less than two years. Bachelor's degree programs: Bachelor's degree programs normally take four years to complete and allow students to major in areas of study such as food business management, hospitality management or food science.
Additional academic requirements might involve foreign languages or science and math courses. Why do people attend culinary school? Pros of going to culinary school. Thoroughness of training. Knife skills: Cooks spend an enormous amount of time working with knives. As a culinary school student, you learn the functions of different knives, the types of cuts used in professional kitchens and how to take care of your knives.
Types of cookery: Culinary schools prepare cooks for the different roles they might fill in a professional kitchen. Common types of cookery students learn include butchery, sauce making, cold foods, hot appetizers, fish and meat.
Safety skills: Culinary schools teach students how to use equipment such as knives, ovens and stoves responsibly. They also teach guidelines for proper food handling to prevent foodborne illness and unsanitary conditions. Kitchen etiquette and culture: Many professional kitchens follow strict hierarchies and have workplace cultures that are foreign to new cooks.
Culinary school instructors teach students what to expect and how to behave when working. Task and time management: Cooking professionally requires the ability to complete several projects at the same time and prioritize tasks independently. Students practice multitasking to become quicker and more efficient.
Plating: Culinary school students learn how to make food appear exciting and appetizing on the plate. Positive learning environment. Exposure to cuisines. Or if you're going to get one at all. And since even a great mentor might not have time to teach all the necessary skills to an inexperienced cook, self-motivation is especially important for on-the-job learning.
Los Angeles chef and restaurateur Suzanne Goin built a solid career despite never having gone to culinary school. But when she was hired at the legendary Chez Panisse, she knew she had more to learn. She stayed in Alice Waters' famed kitchen for two years, and has now built herself an empire that includes the likes of Lucques and A. All that studying might not have been necessary to get to that point but, she says, it made it easier.
There's more out there for aspiring cooks than a fancy degree from one of the country's top culinary schools. Though chef John Besh sends his scholarship students to the pricey ICC, he believes that what's important is culinary education in any form. These smaller schools and community college programs are likely to be far less expensive than a major culinary school. And, in some cases, these schools might be more hooked into their communities, too. Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore executive chef Oliver Beckert checks in with the local culinary programs when he's hiring.
His team will visit these schools, but Beckert says the schools themselves can be quite pushy about helping their students find employment. Another potential upside of culinary schools. Though some big-name chefs might prefer applicants from big-name schools — Eric Ripert noted last month that he likes to take students "from the good schools" such as the CIA, ICC, and ICE — attending a small school won't necessarily put one's resume at the bottom of the pile. Beckert says he does a bit of research into a school when he comes across one with which he is unfamiliar.
But, as will be explored a little more later on, it is supremely important to research a community program and to have realistic expectations of it. Not all schools will be that active in creating employment opportunities for their students, and not all employers will be impressed by a resume that consists mainly of community college courses. Apprenticeships might be one of the best ways to get into cooking if they were not so rare in the United States.
Beckert, the chef at the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore, was born in Nuremberg, Germany, where he also apprenticed at a one-Michelin-star restaurant named Bammes. After a short time of working for one meal and one beer a day and somewhere to rest between shifts , Beckert enrolled in a formal three-year apprenticeship program.
Rather than paying for culinary school or staging without compensation, Beckert's apprenticeship was paid. It wasn't very much, Beckert says, but it was "enough to survive. While Beckert started off with five apprentices in his class, there were only two of them left at the end of the three years. Apprenticeships were once the most common way that cooks learned their trade, but aside from the more informal stage system, it hasn't quite taken root in the United States.
Some programs do exist: the American Culinary Federation offers four apprenticeship options: 1, hours, 4, hours, 6, hours, and a hybrid program. And apprenticeships still happen in Europe, where even celebrity chef Jamie Oliver offers a yearlong program for 18 young cooks that is 65 percent kitchen time, plus some courses and other professional development like sourcing trips and team-building activities.
David Chang has long made the case for instituting apprenticeships, telling Big Think back in that he believes "the education system should probably encourage people to become cobblers, tailors, or whatever. It's like these are professions that are honorable and there's only one way you can really be great at it, and that's learning from people who have done it a long time.
Daniel Boulud thinks young cooks who train in a kitchen rather than a school "deserve to have a valid certification.
So if apprenticeships are already happening naturally, what's the point in institutionalizing them? Well, Daniel Boulud says that he thinks young cooks who train in a kitchen rather than a school "deserve to have a valid certification" of their experience.
There's also the matter of picking the right school teaching the right skills, as the many culinary school grads who have sued their alma maters might attest. While San Francisco pastry chef Bill Corbett has plenty of criticism for culinary school, he says, " I don't think damning the whole system is appropriate. Conversations with local chefs had persuaded her that some culinary schools were not really teaching their students how to taste their dishes, operate outside of recipes, and fix their mistakes.
These are the basics of "culinary intuition," as she calls it. And so with the SFCS, Liano has set out to correct what she perceives as a deficiency in culinary education. Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park dean of culinary arts Brendan Walsh says that from their first day of school, CIA students are also tasting, touching, and feeling ingredients, and building their perceptions of seasoning. In their freshman year, students have a physiology of food class that teaches things like why comfort foods have such a profound psychological effect.
And there are other skills, too, that Walsh thinks culinary schools ought to be teaching students in order to become successful restaurant chefs. Seeing restaurants close, he says, you realize what those skills are in terms of long-term thinking and knowing how to work with other people.
Even just figuring out how to make your restaurant concept right for its community is valuable. And communications director Jeff Levine agrees, saying, " We're preparing them for life, not just how to cook an egg. Each school has its own way of building an education. The San Francisco Cooking School offers tiny classes of 14 people that culminates in a culinary certification after six months.
Working chefs come in fairly frequently for full-day sessions to show students things like how to break down a pig. Students take field trips. Repetition is key, and so are the externship placements. SFCS has also tossed out some elements of the traditional culinary school curriculum, such as sous vide, which San Francisco chefs told Liano they could teach new cooks themselves in two days.
Rather, she says, SFCS is teaching students things like how two fats react together or why mayonnaise breaks and how to fix it. The Culinary Institute of America is a much bigger school, but it also keeps class sizes to 16 students per chef-instructor. Each graduating class has four groups of students enrolled in the culinary arts program and one in the pastry program, so there are about 80 new students every three weeks.
Classes rotate in three-week blocks, though the introductory culinary fundamentals class lasts for five three-week periods. After the culinary fundamentals course, students will begin to cook for each other and eventually even the public before graduation. The CIA program offers two sets of three-week "classes" spent operating the school's on-site and very real restaurants, and it also has an externship requirement.
After the two-year associate's degree program, a student can choose to stay for a bachelor's degree that involves some liberal arts courses. Other culinary schools overlap and differ with these programs. Prospective students should do their research into all of these options and figure out what type of curriculum best suits their own goals and temperament.
It helps to examine a school's history with controversy, too, when deciding where to spend your money. Earlier this year, a group of undergraduate students staged a widely publicized protest of what they perceived as the school's weakened educational standards. But one student, Kwame Onwuachi , insists that the small group was not representative of the student body at large.
The protestors had asked him to take part in it, too, and he refused. But it's hard to know for sure the scope of the protest. One of the walkout organizers told the New York Times back in April that "many, many more are with us, but they're afraid to publicly show their support for us. Regardless of the incident, the CIA remains generally well-regarded within the chef community. Daniel Boulud defends the school, calling the incident "embarrassing" and "ridiculous," and explaining that the students, "should have known way before they were stepping in where they were going.
But protests and lawsuits at culinary schools in other parts of the country have not elicited such vigorous defenses. In , the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, and San Francisco's California Culinary Academy were all sued by former students who claimed to be misled about their post-grad career opportunities.
The CIA's dean of culinary arts Brendan Walsh and communications director Jeff Levine say that the for-profit culinary schools — which can afford to blast their message to a wider audience with TV ads — complicate matters for non-profits like the CIA. The difference, Walsh says, is that the CIA's core business is education, while money is the core business for the for-profit institutions. But, of course, costs are a critique for all schools. It's also key to research the faculty before going to culinary school.
Just as not every chef is going to be a good mentor, not every culinary school instructor is going to be an engaged or engaging teacher. Corbett sees it as even more dire, saying, " I think there are few culinary schools that actually have really talented educators within the schools.
Most culinary schools are staffed by people who are done with the restaurant industry. It's up to the schools to make sure they are hiring the right faculty, and it's also up to culinary school applicants to make sure they are seeking out the right teachers. But, I mean, that brings the question, is the program you're offering the Juilliard of culinary school?
Networking is an area in which culinary school has a distinct advantage over going straight to work in a kitchen. And not just for aspiring restaurant chefs, either. At culinary school, students get the opportunity to meet chefs and food service professionals from the owners of a small California vineyard to the legendary Thomas Keller.
Many culinary programs also involve some sort of externship program that provides another opportunity to interact with professional chefs and potential employers. It's not that way everywhere. When Bill Corbett first arrived in San Francisco to work at its two-Michelin-star Michael Mina restaurant, he reached out to one of the local culinary schools to build connections and bring in students.
The school never responded. Now, though, he expects to take in some students from the SFCS pastry program once they reach the externship phase. The CIA's approved externship list includes four of the top five kitchens on the World's 50 Best Restaurant list Copenhagen's Noma being the exception. Students might also do their externships at the Food Network or the San Francisco Chronicle , depending on their interests. To help manage these, the school has a dedicated externship office that ensures students will be doing more than just getting coffee for the chef.
Beyond these kinds of opportunities to meet established chefs, culinary schools are also a place to meet a side swath of similarly minded fellow students. These students might someday be the key to a future job or partnership. While externship and networking opportunities are helpful for obtaining a job, some culinary school programs do go a little further.
The CIA, for example, has a placement office that its alumni can use throughout the course of their careers to help find available positions. And the school hosts career fairs at the campus gym where independent restaurants, resorts, cruise lines, supermarkets, representatives from the New York State school system, and healthcare professionals turn up to recruit graduates.
So culinary school is certainly a useful leg up in job hunting. That's especially true in the hotel or corporate chef career path, where the application process is fairly rigorous.
Oliver Beckert of the Four Seasons explains that candidates have to go through four to five interviews before they land a position. He likes to hire culinary school graduates and says he would probably consider them before a candidate who didn't go to culinary school. While Beckert knows that there are plenty of cooks who learn on the job, he's looking for someone who already knows the basics.
That is something that culinary school does provide. But having a culinary school degree or certification doesn't necessarily give job applicants an edge, as several other chefs have indicated.
Los Angeles restaurateur Suzanne Goin says that if she had a resume in hand from a cook who had spent a year working in a restaurant with which she was familiar, she "would take that person long before I would take the culinary school person for sure. Having a culinary school degree or certification doesn't necessarily give job applicants an edge. Your high school guidance counselor may also have suggestions. It is cost effective and the connections you make with your chef instructors; they invest in you back.
Finally, private loans can be taken out to finance the remainder of your education. Escoffier also offers flexible payment plans to students who plan to pay for their education by check or credit card. Reach out to a Financial Aid representative for more information. We all love to watch eccentric celebrity chefs on the Food Network, but they comprise a small minority of working chefs. The reason those famous faces reached such heights of success is their genuine passion for food and cooking.
The love for the industry comes first! While the classroom provides students with the foundational skills for many of these careers, a great culinary school will go further when helping students and graduates to achieve their goals.
At Escoffier, each student is assigned a Career Success coach to provide encouragement and resources as they work through their programs. If a student seems to be struggling, their coach will reach out to help keep the student on track. Resume writing help, interview coaching, and networking opportunities will all be accessible to graduates — for life.
If you have dietary restrictions, you can absolutely still attend culinary school. There is a big market for chefs that can accommodate specific diets like gluten free or vegan. If you have an allergy, like a peanut or shellfish allergy, please contact us. Students are responsible for securing their own apartments. Escoffier has partnerships with apartment complexes in both Austin and Boulder that may be a helpful resource to incoming students. The food industry is a business. Students will be expected to arrive for classes on time and well-prepared.
You have to be serious in this business. Students can expect to receive the same respect in return. Culinary school is a time to learn — unlike what you may see on TV, no one will be throwing anything or shouting at you! The end of high school is a time full of possibility and excitement. The team at Escoffier is ready to answer any additional questions you may have. Contact our Admissions Department to learn more and get your application started! Programs and Curriculum Culinary school, just like any other post-secondary education, is an investment in your future.
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