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I'm at the back of the kitchen taking notes. In my red polo shirt, I stand out like a splotch of catsup on a starched white tablecloth as Chef Sarah Stegner lays out the plan for cooking the evening's dinner. A hyperenergetic 36-year old, she's clad all in white and surrounded by an army of maybe 18 students and fellow chefs, all in cooking smocks and toques. We listen raptly as Stegner explains the meal we're about to cook and assigns this person to toast the
brioche, that person to chop tomatoes.
The kitchen reminds me a lot of the one at Camp Highlands, the summer camp I used to go to in northern Wisconsin. Except that instead of dinner starting with fruit Jell-o, the first course this evening is an exquisite duck liver terrine rolled in truffles, served with toasted brioche. And instead of a grouchy camp counselor barking out orders, there's Stegner, who's the dining-room chef at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago and one of the top chefs in the Midwest. And the kitchen we're in is a teaching facility at Kendall College's School of Culinary Arts in suburban Evanston, Ill.
BYOW.
This is my hot dining tip for the summer. If you're interested in good food and are a little tight with your pennies, start planning an evening out now at your local culinary institute. If my experience at Kendall is any indication, it's one of the great bargains of the food world. Our five-course meal was almost entirely cooked by Stegner and George Bumbaris, 43, who's the Ritz-Carlton's executive chef. It cost $29, excluding wine -- which diners must bring with them at Kendall.
If you've stayed at the Chicago Ritz-Carlton on business trips, you may have had similar food. The meal we were served by Kendall students duplicated a tasting menu at the Ritz-Carlton priced at $85, also not including wine.
As the chefs and students prepared the first course, I joined my dinner companions, my neighbors Theresa Erhart with her husband Dan Devening, a well-known Chicago artist, and their friend Paul Lisnek, a Chicago lawyer/entrepreneur. It was my first experience with cooking-school cuisine,
and I must say I came away impressed.
Let me just run through the menu from start to finish. The duck liver terrine was exquisite, partly because Stegner and Bumbaris didn't skimp on the grated black truffles the duck pate was coated in, as one might expect for a cut-rate cooking-school meal. It also was served with ripe mission figs in a port wine reduction, providing just the right sweet complement that a French Sauterne might have -- if we'd thought to bring one.
As much care went into selecting and preparing ingredients as into cooking them
The second course was a slow-roasted salmon served with chanterelle mushrooms in a cream sauce. As might be expected of a Business Week correspondent who was based for five years in Paris and seven years in Manhattan, I've had my fair share of [mainly expense account] meals in expensive restaurants. But I've never had salmon that was so perfectly and uniformly prepared. The slow cooking leaves the fish incredibly tender throughout.
The chefs took great pains with the main course, lamb chops wrapped in vegetable mousseline, served with a tiny onion tart, sungold tomatoes, and braised baby fennel. They rejected their original shipment of lamb from Australia as too gamey, so the Ritz-Carlton's butcher had spent much of the weekend taking the sinew and fat out of a shipment of Colorado chops so they would be marvelously tender when served coated with the mousseline. The chefs tracked down the tomatoes, onions, and other fresh ingredients at an open-air market called Chicago's Green City Market (open to the public 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays).
The quality of the French-style cheese course that followed was a bit mixed. The Roquefort was creamy and had the appropriate bite. The Reblochon was way too mild for my taste (real French Reblochon is so pungent it would probably clear half of Soldier Field if you placed a chunk on the 50-yard line). The Hudson Valley Camembert was also underripe compared to the genuine French equivalent. On the other hand, the dessert -- an almond souffle with fromage blanc sorbet, was wonderfully delicate.
RESERVE EARLY.
I can't guarantee that most cooking-school meals will be this good. The one we sampled was part of a special series in which visiting chefs do much of the cooking. Most nights, the students do the cooking under the supervision of a chef-instructor at the school. I doubt that all schools can afford to be as picky about ingredients as the Ritz-Carlton, or that the students are as skillful as these master chefs. Nonetheless, veteran cooking-school diners say the food is usually quite good.
Cooking-school-operated restaurants are in and around most major cities. But get cracking now if you want to test one out for yourself. Meals like the one we attended sell out almost immediately. Harry Crane, the Kendall chef instructor who organized our meal, says you have to book two to four months in advance to get into the school's restaurant on a Friday or Saturday evening and several weeks in advance for weekday reservations.
A final note: If you're contemplating a midlife career change, you might consider cooking. Harry Crane, 54, was an entrepreneur with an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School before his passion for cooking got the better of him. Bumbaris, who in 1992 won first prize for the U.S. at the
prestigious Prix Culinaire International competition in Paris, worked in auto-body repair and construction before going to cooking school. "I probably would have made more money in construction," he says. "I might be buying these meals instead of cooking them. But this is more fun." So it is. Bon
appetīt!
Peterson is a contributing editor for Business Week Online. Follow his Moveable Feast, every Tuesday on BW Online
Copyright 2000 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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