I believe in culinary education.
I serve on the advisory boards for several culinary programs in Richmond and beyond. Throughout my career, I have also worked with graduates and students from programs ranging from technical centers and community colleges to Johnson & Wales and the Culinary Institute of America. I have seen some tremendous young cooks come through those programs. Talented, curious, hardworking people who have gone on to build great careers.
I have also seen graduates walk into a professional kitchen believing that because they have a culinary degree, they are ready to be a Sous Chef.
That is where culinary education and the realities of our profession sometimes lose each other.
A diploma tells me that you completed a program. It tells me you were exposed to foundational techniques, sanitation, product identification, nutrition, costing, baking and pastry, butchery, classical cooking methods, and hopefully some leadership and business fundamentals. Those things matter. They provide a foundation that can take years to pick up piecemeal on the job.
However, a diploma does not tell me what happens when your station gets hit with 30 tables at once.
It does not tell me whether you can organize a lowboy, communicate with the cook next to you, recover from a mistake, recognize that you are going down and need help before it happens, or keep your composure when you have been cooking for eight hours and there are still another four left before you can clean up and clock out.
Only experience teaches those lessons.
Over the years, I have hired and worked alongside graduates from some of the best-known culinary schools in the country. Some have been outstanding. However, I have also worked with young cooks from community colleges, public-school culinary programs, and technical centers who arrived with more practical experience, more urgency, and sometimes a much greater appetite to learn.
The name on the diploma does not determine a cook's quality.
Like any educational opportunity, culinary school is only as valuable as what the student is willing to absorb. Give two students the same Chef instructors, the same kitchen, the same curriculum, and the same equipment, and they can leave with completely different levels of preparedness.
One may leave saying, "I graduated. What's my title?"
The other leaves asking, "What can I learn next?"
I'll take the second cook every time.
That does not diminish the work culinary educators do. Quite the opposite. I have tremendous respect for the Chefs who choose to teach this craft. Their jobs are necessary and, in many cases, incredibly difficult. They are responsible not only for teaching students how to hold a knife and make a sauce, but also for introducing young people to an industry that can provide an incredible lifelong career.
We need them.
But I also believe we owe students an accurate picture of the profession they are entering.
Professional cooking means nights. It means weekends. It means holidays. Mother's Day probably is not a day off. Neither is Valentine's Day. When your friends are getting together on Saturday night, you may be standing behind a range. You might spend Christmas Eve preparing Christmas dinner for hundreds of other families.
That is not a complaint. It is the profession.
This career brings tremendous rewards: creativity, camaraderie, travel, competition, craftsmanship, leadership, and the satisfaction of creating experiences people remember for years. I've built my life around this industry and wouldn't have done it if I did not believe those rewards were worth it. However, this life is not for everyone, and students deserve to understand the full bargain before spending tens of thousands of dollars pursuing it.
I firmly believe every culinary student should work in a professional kitchen while they are in school or, at minimum, complete a meaningful internship or apprenticeship.
Not after graduation.
During school.
A classroom can teach you how to make hollandaise. A restaurant teaches you what it's like to make it while five other things need your attention.
School can teach knife cuts. A daily prep list teaches efficiency.
School can teach sanitation. A professional kitchen teaches you that sanitation has to happen while you're collecting mise en place for recipes, receiving an order, watching a sauce reduce, training another cook, all while getting ready for dinner service.
Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, working in the industry lets a student discover whether they actually enjoy the work.
Finding out at 18 or 19, while enrolled in a culinary program, that restaurant life isn't for you is not failure. Finding out after taking on significant debt and spending several years preparing for a career you've never actually experienced is a much harder lesson.
The best model, in my view, is education and experience happening simultaneously.
Teach Escoffier but put the student on a busy sauté station.
Teach food cost but let them see an actual P&L.
Teach the brigade system but make sure they've actually been part of one.
And before we start talking to young cooks about becoming Executive Chefs, let's help them become great cooks.
Because culinary programs can teach technique, introduce discipline, expose students to ingredients, cuisines, equipment, and ideas they might otherwise spend years discovering. Great Chef instructors can inspire students and fundamentally change the direction of their careers.
But culinary schools cannot manufacture experience.
There is no substitute for repetition. No substitute for getting your butt kicked during a busy service and coming back the next day better prepared. No substitute for working next to someone faster than you, cleaner than you, more organized than you, and realizing you have another level to reach.
Those experiences create humility, confidence, and competence in ways that a diploma alone cannot.
So, yes, I believe in culinary school.
I believe in the Chefs teaching in those schools. I believe in technical centers, community colleges, university programs, apprenticeships, and continuing education. I believe our industry needs all of them because, to this day, after 25-plus years in the industry, I am still a student.
But we need to be careful about what we promise young Chefs.
Culinary school can give you a foundation.
It can give you knowledge.
It can give you opportunities.
What it cannot give you is the thousands of hours required to turn that knowledge into instinct.
A culinary degree may help get you through the kitchen door.
What happens after you walk through it is what molds you into a Chef.
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