Hofmeister leaves Century Plaza to head new culinary school

Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 5, 1988 by Richard Martin

Hofmeister leaves Century Plaza to head new culinary school

LOS ANGELES -- The transformation of Los Angeles into one of the most prolific breeding grounds for new restaurants has coincided with the city's growing crop of ambitious young cooks.

But professional culinary training institutions have shown negligible growth locally. Too bad.

In much the same way that Hollywood lures naive movie-star hopefuls, restaurant-dense Los Angeles attracts its share of "chefs" whose career expectations and resumes may be inflated unrealistically by diplomas from prestigious culinary academies.

So, perhaps it was only a matter of time before chef Raimund Hofmeister got around to spearheading the establishment here of a large-scale facility for the "hands-on" training of restaurant cooks.

Hofmeister, the award-winning Culinary Olympian and veteran executive chef of Westin's flagship Century Plaza Hotel, has for years been an outspoken critic of big-tuition culinary institutions whose curricula are long on theory but short on practical experience.

Using the exemplary apprenticeship program he runs for Westin as a point of comparison, Hofmeister frequently criticizes even the best-known culinary schools for graduating so-called chefs who are seriously undertrained. Many of those graduates become bitterly disillusioned, he says, when he is forced to reject their bids for employment because they lack basic skills.

"They end up telling me that they really don't know what they paid $20,000 [tuition] for," the German-born chef remarks.

According to Hofmeister, his Los Angeles International Culinary Institute will feature a curriculum that closes such loopholes. "I can be sure that when my students graduate they'll know how to make veal chops," he boasts.

The brainchild of the 39-year-old chef and his backers, L.A.I.C.I. would cost $12 million to launch in a refurbished, 80,000-square-foot space atop the historic Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles. Late 1989 is the school's targeted inauguration date, depending on the timely completion of financing and occupancy negotiations.

In addition to state-of-the-art instructional facilities, the institute will operate two public restaurants, a fine-dining room, and an all-day "market-theme" operation, that would offer its 700 students abundant opportunities to sharpen their skills.

In addition, Hofmeister plans to establish a symbiotic link between his student body and downtown hotels, which operate some 7,000 rooms within walking distance of the proposed campus.

While the hotels would provide a source of part-time employment for the students, the school would function as an off-premises butchery kitchen for the hotels, dramatically lowering their labor costs and generating plenty of practical experience for the young cooks.

"We could bone enough veal, lamb, and beef to run two meat classes every day," says Hofmeister, who ought to know about such volumes. Since 1979 the German-born chef has run one of the country's premier hotel culinary operations, one that routinely does all the butchering, baking, and cooking for more than 20,000 meals a week.

"Our intention is to put as much real-world environment into the school as possible," explains Hofmeister, who is waiting for the right stage of the institute's development before leaving Westin.

The chef made a point of stressing how his instructional philosophy differs from that of schools which seem to offer short-cuts to chef status. "You should run a cooking school from the standpoint of producing cooks who are raw-diamond material," he notes. "Then you have someone who can be molded into a chef."

Looking beyond the needs of Southern California's food-service industry, Hofmeister envisions a significant part of L.A.I.C.I.'s enrollment coming from Asia, Australia, and Latin America. "We'll focus on the Pacific Rim; that's where the future is," he declares.

The 24-month course of study will be divided into two nine-month instruction periods and a six-month employment externship. Four certified master chefs have made commitments to join the school as the nucleus of its faculty. Hofmeister, who will be the president of the institute, expects tuition to run between $16,000 and $18,000 a year, or $24,000 with full room and board.

He is not alone in recognizing the Los Angeles area as a potentially lucrative market for a serious culinary institution. The San Francisco-based California Culinary Academy recently disclosed plans to open a 1,000-student branch in Los Angeles.

Expansion of the 10-year-old C.C.A. would come under the direction of its new president, Dr. Thomas A. Bloom, the former vice president of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. Bloom recently joined the C.C.A. after a brief stint as director of the expanding Center for Hospitality Management at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, in eastern Los Angeles county.

During Bloom's short tenure as head of the Cal Poly Center, he and Hofmeister discussed how the proposed L.A.I.C.I. might be affiliated with the Cal Poly operation or incorporated into it.