Culinary school - an institution going extinct?
I was recently doing a shift at a popular London restaurant. Having heard many good things about the place, I was keen to work with people who clearly had an insane level of expertise and skill. As they were happily chopping, frying, and chatting away, telling me about the kitchens they had previously worked at, I asked the inevitable follow-up question:
“Did any of you go to cooking school?”
The kitchen erupted with laughter.
I can’t say I was very surprised. But it did strike me as a telling indicator of the dwindling relevance of culinary school in today’s hospitality industry. We now find ourselves in a new generation of chefs who evolved beyond and even reject the traditional paths of culinary education.
And honestly, I do think it’s for the best.
When I started cheffing, I regularly got asked by friends and family whether the fact that I hadn’t done any formal training was ever a problem; either to my supervisors or to peers who might have put in hard work to complete culinary school and now resented me for working alongside them on a similar level. And from an outsider’s perspective, their questions might be very valid. Most jobs and careers today require certain levels of education, qualifications, or experience, so why shouldn’t it be the same for chefs?
Cheffing walks a fine line between getting categorised as a skilled or an unskilled job. It may be considered unskilled because, as with many starting positions in the hospitality industry, a great part of the job is mostly about showing up and following instructions from someone else. As long as you are not put in a senior role, you are not required to deal with a lot of responsibility or deliver great acts of creativity or management. Additionally, although salaries are generally improving in the restaurant industry, even when you work your way up to a more senior position, your income will still likely stay on the more modest side compared to the senior salaries in other sectors.
On the other hand, especially when looking at restaurants that strive for great success, high ratings and accreditations, chefs are generally required to possess excellent skills of execution, creativity, in-depth knowledge and experience in a variety of techniques, cuisines, dishes, flavour palates, and presentation. This is without considering the responsibilities of head chefs who may be under the pressure of managing an entire team, running and maintaining a professional kitchen that meets all hygiene and safety guidelines, whilst maintaining a high culinary standard and even reinventing themselves and their menu on a regular basis. With this perspective, cheffing becomes, in my opinion, very much a highly skilled job.
As such, I agree that it makes sense - in theory – to create courses and institutions that are dedicated to teaching the skill of cheffing and I am sure that it can be, and has been, a valuable experience for many people. It can be a great place to learn and practise techniques in a controlled environment that carefully tracks and pushes progress and learning. Especially when it comes to the near scientific knowledge required for pastry chefs and bakers, it may be very helpful to be told to make a choux pastry hundreds of times until you can perfectly make it with your eyes closed. It may allow you to explore certain techniques and particular dishes. It will likely refine your knife skills and other abilities and train you to be quick and efficient.
That being said, I would now propose that anyone who is not overly familiar with culinary education to have a quick Google search and look up cooking schools. When you find an aesthetic-looking website, I would suggest you find the “fees and tuition” pages, and then come back to me.
Fun, isn’t it.
My favourite example is a diploma by a international culinary institute offering a nine-month, full-time course which, in London, you get to complete for a mere £43,000.
What a steal.
Now I, for one, really struggle to see the justification of such a price. I understand that financing a culinary course including the equipment, premises, ingredients, and training may come up to a considerable sum. But from the student’s point of view, this fee is simply absurd. To put it in perspective, this is currently almost twice the yearly starting salary of a young chef in the UK. And unlike completing university degrees, where you may be able to enter a career with promising salary expectations, the income in hospitality will remain comparatively modest for most, making the fee for culinary school all the more ridiculous.
Furthermore, I do not think that completing a culinary degree properly prepares you for the job. In fact, I don’t think it teaches you any more than if you simply started at an entry-level kitchen job and worked your way up, nor does it necessarily improve your career chances when you enter the professional world. A hiring restaurant may know that you will be able to demonstrate some technical skills and maybe identify the different mother sauces. But to put it simply, after the completion of culinary school, you may be a trained cook, but you are not guaranteed to be a good chef. And a cook coming out of school will just as much have to prove themselves in a trial and the probation period as anyone else. So again, to charge eager young students this unearthly amount of money for a nine-month just so they can make a perfect French omelette (among other things, I’m sure), really makes no sense to me.
Another problem I observe is that most of the big culinary schools lay a fairly exclusive focus on traditional Western cuisine, particularly French cooking. I am not here to criticise traditional French cuisine; I think there are many valuable lessons to learn that can be applied to all types of cooking. But I struggle with the idea that it gets taught as an international culinary standard. It perpetuates the idea that this type of Western cuisine is the basis of good cooking across the world, the key to “fine dining” even, neglecting or ignoring other cuisines and techniques. While there are cooking programmes dedicated to cuisines other than French, the schools make sure to label them very much as “other”. To refer to the aforementioned culinary school again, you need to scroll down past the “regular” cuisine courses, pastry training, bread making, hospitality management, and wine before you eventually get to “Cuisines of the world”. In an increasingly globalised hospitality industry that values sharing different cuisines from across the world, a cooking school that mostly teaches you French techniques simply feels outdated, a product from previous generations. It also seems to miss out on training new generations of chefs who may wish to prioritise more sustainable cooking that reduces waste and animal products.
Finally, it needs to be said that the fading relevance and necessity of culinary schools is really the only natural consequence of the expansion of the internet and the ability to easily share more information about food across the world. Before this, going to a culinary school may have been the only way to properly educate and train yourself to become a chef. I, on the other hand, learned a lot of my current skills and knowledge from the internet, as I am sure have many others. Home cooks who may never intend to go into professional cooking can now make restaurant-level food at home due to the information available online for free. Thanks to the know-how I had been developing at home, I was able to not completely embarrass myself on trial shifts, thus enabling me to start working in professional kitchens and develop my abilities further.
And frankly, what I appreciate about this is that it allows people to become chefs purely based on their personal commitment, motivation, and work ethic. Considering how many jobs and careers now demand a variety of certificates, expensive degrees, and (even unpaid) work experiences, cheffing allows someone who is keen, willing to learn and show up every day to get their foot into the door and work their way up the kitchen ladder if they so choose. It really is about as democratic a career choice as you can get. If restaurants started demanding formal culinary training for all chefs, this would be completely reversed, and it would limit the training to those privileged enough to pay large sums for a certificate.
So really, I found the reaction to my question as to who had gone to culinary school an apt sign of an evolving industry. I do still respect the institution and I appreciate the importance culinary schools may have had in training some of the best chefs in the world. I also understand that there may be improved, alternative cooking schools that charge less and that are perhaps more open to a wider range of cuisines, thus completely undermining this entire rant of mine. But fundamentally, I believe culinary schools to be a thing of the past, and if anyone ever asks me, I will forever recommend learning to cook on the job rather than enrolling in a culinary course. If someone is keen to learn and willing to put in the work, wherever they are, I can guarantee that they will soon find themselves confidently cooking away in a great kitchen.