Back-to-cooking-school days come to Ritz-Carlton

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct 4, 1993 by Jack Hayes

ATLANTA - Riding the success of a popular spring cooking series - a six-week evening program launched as Food and Wine 101 - the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead here is repeating the kitchen seminars this fall in a sold-out classroom.

Written in the format of its original "curriculum," which ran during April and May, the new series, Food and Wine 102, showcases Ritz - Carlton chefs cooking up signature plates before an enthusiastic white-tablecloth student audience.

"The classes seem to be taking off again this season," said the Ritz-Carlton's Margaret Cooper, who is marketing the food-and-beverage-department-created event.

Garnishing the classroom again this fall is local wine expert Michael Venezia, who is education director for one of Atlanta's major beverage wholesalers that supplies the four wines featured with the foods prepared in each class.

Students get to not only watch but also taste the dishes and wines. Furthermore, the two-hour classes end with one-on-one conversation, dessert and more wine.

"It automatically becomes a social thing," Cooper said. "You hear everyone swapping notes and impressions." The students get fancy notebooks stacked with chef biographies, recipes and pasted-in wine labels.

Priced at $50 per evening, classes are discounted to those who attend more than four. The six-class package is $250 and, Cooper said, two-thirds of the students are buying it that way.

"From a food and labor cost perspective, I'd say we are doing nicely with these classes," noted Mauro Canaglia, executive chef at the Buckhead property. The spring classes were bursting at the seams with 50 students per session - sometimes overflowing to 55. But for intimacy's sake, at the request of repeat participants, the fall series is running with classes of 40.

While the Buckhead unit hosted its own culinarians last spring - including Canaglia plus dining-room chef Guenter Seeger, Cafe chef Daniel Andre and executive pastry chef David Robins - the fall series brings in four guest cooks to highligrit an "international theme."

They include Gary Danko, Philip Reininger and Francois Lecoin, from the Ritz-Carlton's San Francisco, Boston and downtown Atlanta properties, as well as Enzo Dellea, a visiting Italian chef who has done the hotel's Taste of Tuscany each fall since 1990.

A bonus for the cooking series is the graduation dinner, which booked 100 paying seats last spring. This fall's graduation event is being reduced to 80 for the same reason that the weekly cooking classes were downsized.

The graduation event - a banquet feast of signatures and paired wines from the entire series - is priced separately at $80 per student. This year's event will feature Venezia narrating a travelogue of Italy's wine growing country.

"It's a special evening because everyone gets a diploma," Cooper explained. In fact, it's so special the hotel had to book a "reunion" dinner for its Food and Wine 101 graduates again in July, Cooper said.

Thus far Buckhead is the only Ritz-Carlton hotel testing the gourmet evening cooking series.

The Ritz-Carlton Atlanta, which operates downtown, had tested a series of intimate "cooking weekends" with limited success a few years ago. Those classes brought students into the kitchen to observe the making of a four-course gourmet meal and included an introductory wine seminar with the hotel's sommelier.