The students all wore white chef coats, houndstooth pants and short toques as they tasted their lamb tagines for salt. Floor-to-ceiling windows in the sleek kitchen framed a sweeping view of the Merrimack river.
North of Boston, US, in the culinary school at Northern Essex Community College, the students will learn about sous vide cooking, use pastry sheeters to laminate dough, break down whole pigs and try molecular gastronomy techniques. The job placement rate after graduation is 100 per cent.
“Probably even more,” said Denis Boucher, the coordinator of the culinary programme. “There could be two or three jobs per student around here.”
The price of that education: about $6,500 (Rs 4,89,908.25) for a certificate and $14,000 (Rs 10,55,187) for an associate degree — or less, as many culinary students receive grants or scholarships. Compare that with the Culinary Institute of America, an acclaimed private school where a single semester at its Hyde Park, New York, campus costs nearly $20,000 (Rs 15,07,410).
Less than a decade ago, the number of culinary schools in the United States was rising rapidly. But the past few years have been challenging. Confronted with increasingly steep operating costs and a pandemic that hamstrung the restaurant business, several schools have permanently closed.
What’s left, for the most part, are the most recognisable names and culinary schools at community colleges like Northern Essex, which has doubled its enrolment to 33 students since the programme began in 2020 and expects to more than double that total this fall.
Many other community colleges have opened or expanded culinary programmes in recent years, offering a high-quality education at a fraction of the cost of a private cooking school.
While they lack the prestige of the big names, these institutes may be better matched to the current economy. They can be a critical resource for a restaurant business in desperate need of line cooks and other skilled workers, as well as for students seeking to start a career without running up big debts.
The boom in community college cooking programmes has caught the attention of local governments and businesses, which are playing an active role in driving their growth.
For all their innovation, community colleges still can’t provide everything that private schools do, like a network of influential alumni or internships around the world. Jeffrey Gardner, a consulting chef in Atlanta, US, said the community college graduates he has hired often have an outdated, classically French training, as their teachers may not have worked in restaurants recently. “A lot of what they were taught would have been fine for ’90s hotel banquets,” he said.
Katherine Ventura, the student at Northern Essex, was surprised the instruction didn’t reflect the ethnic diversity of her peers. “The type of culture we are cooking for, usually it is just Western or something,” she said. “I wish it was more Asian or North African or something different.”
Such drawbacks may not matter as much for the many students who simply want to find a reliable job rather than become a celebrity chef or open a specific style of restaurant.
Michael Stamets, the associate dean of the hospitality programmes at the State University of New York College at Broome, US, said that even though the programme isn’t widely renowned, it is well respected in the New York area where most students are seeking employment. If the Culinary Institute of America prepares students “a little better for a global market,” he said, “we are preparing them for a local market.”
Many of those local markets are becoming dining hubs in their own right and are in need of employees.
Prince George’s Community College, in Largo, Maryland, US, is about 15 miles from National Harbor, a large dining and residential complex along the Potomac River that opened in 2008. The area’s growth spurred significant investment by the school and county into the school’s culinary programme in 2018, said Denise Ware-Jackson, chair of the college’s wellness, culinary and hospitality department.
Sussex County Community College, in Newton, New Jersey, US, recently refocussed its food and beverage management programme on professional cooking because of the sheer number of requests from local businesses for cooks, said Martin Kester, programme supervisor. All 12 of Sussex’s culinary graduates from the past three years are still working in the food business, he said.
Community college degrees have long been disparaged as inferior. Culinary institutes, which tend to attract more attention from prospective students than other trade programmes, may help reverse that, said Kester.
“There is still a stigma that it is a community college,” he said. “That is something we are working very hard to change with programmes like this one that are forward facing and immersed in the community.”
NYTNS