Spooks? No, Good Cooks

By John Elson

The menu is simple but nutritious: fillet of trout meuniere, accompanied by steamed red potatoes, glazed beets and stir-fried vegetables. Sixteen students clad in double-breasted white cook's blouses take notes as chef Kathy Shepard begins her lecture at one of eight stoves in the crowded kitchen. "I want to see lots of colors on the plates," she says of the stir-fry. "Put in garlic if you want. That will be your outlet for creativity today." Then she picks up a slab of fish and shows how to ready it for the saute pan. After the demonstration, the students will try to duplicate Shepard's movements, with a little extra incentive. The trout had better be edible: it's their dinner that night.

Taste is a severe taskmaster at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. The not-for-profit Culinary, or "the other C.I.A.," as it is often called, is perhaps the nation's most influential training school for professional cooks and has ambitious plans to extend its sway. The institute, with an enrollment of 1,850 (23% female, about 12% minority) and a faculty of 100, has a roster of 22,000 alumni that includes such celebrity chefs as Debra Ponzek of New York City's Montrachet restaurant and Dean Fearing of the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas.

Serious foodies can get a taste of what the Culinary offers in the fifth edition of The New Professional Chef (Van Nostrand Reinhold; $49.95), to be published at the end of May. This massive revision of the Culinary's basic text, the first since 1974, contains nearly 700 recipes for everything from andouille sausage to zingara sauce, sometimes in single portions but more often in sufficient quantity to feed a hungry mob of 20. The emphasis of the lavishly illustrated 869-page manual, however, is on correct technique and mise en place -- that is, preparation -- elements that the Culinary was instrumental in establishing as essential to the training of professional chefs in the U.S.

The Culinary began life in 1946 as a storefront training school for World War II vets called the New Haven Restaurant Institute, with an enrollment of 16 and a staff of three. In 1972 it moved from Connecticut to its present home: a hulking, red brick former Jesuit seminary, St. Andrew's-on-the-Hudson. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great theologian, is buried there. Stained- glass windows depicting scenes from the life of Christ adorn a student dining hall that was once the seminary's chapel. It also contains a fresco of the Last Supper, boarded up for safekeeping.

Becoming a chef involves more than just learning to slice and dice. During the 21-month program leading to an associate's degree in occupational studies, students take courses in nutrition and cost control and spend weeks serving and cooking in the Culinary's four on-site public restaurants. (The presentation is stylish, the flavors subtle but often underseasoned.) They must also put in 600 hours of apprenticeship off campus at a C.I.A.-approved restaurant.

The C.I.A.'s Munich-born president, Ferdinand Metz, who went through the traditional European restaurant tutelage system, contends that the comprehensive C.I.A. approach is far superior. "Apprenticeship forces you through a manual experience," says Metz, who is the nation's only certified master chef with an M.B.A. "But in a European kitchen, you wouldn't learn stir-fry cooking unless someone showed you how." One of the C.I.A's 36 kitchens is devoted solely to wok cookery. Hands-on teaching is supplemented by required viewing of the C.I.A.'s made-at-home instructional tapes, which range from wine service to the slaughtering of pigs, slightly edited for gore.

To keep the C.I.A. ahead of younger competitors like Rhode Island's Johnson & Wales University, Metz hopes to establish a four-year college course leading to a bachelor's degree in culinary arts. Last month he opened an office in San Francisco as the first step toward building a branch in California's wine country.

| To Joseph Baum, managing partner of New York City's Rainbow Room, "the C.I.A. has given us a new standard for American chefs." Graduates often have four or more job offers, and they have entree to most of the nation's top kitchens. Andre Soltner, owner-chef of Manhattan's grand luxe Lutece, has three grads who have been with him from four to 10 years. "That should tell you something," he says.