On a Friday afternoon inside Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Las Vegas, a half-dozen pumpkins perch solemnly on a counter, scowling through hollowed-out eyes, mischevious, Joker-like grins painting their faces.
In another kitchen, chefs-in-training congratulate a peer for deft spoon and knife work on his contest-winning jack-o'-lantern, with sinister eyes in the shape of starfish and a horizontal half-moon frown. They then return to the task of preparing caramel apples for touring civilians contemplating culinary careers.
It's a rare bit of downtime for the inaugural class at LCB, whose matriculation is a six-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week, 15-month marathon of mastering 450 culinary proficiencies from brining to baking, consummated by running a full-service restaurant attached to the campus.
As the tourists nibble the candied apples, Jamie Maviglia, a retail manager at the Galleria Mall with dreams of running a bakery and pastry shop, postulates on the lightning pace of learning at LCB, a cooking institution that started in Paris in 1895 and opened in Summerlin in May.
"This is a fast program," she says, "go, go, go, a lot of information."
The pace matches Vegas' rapid ascension up the food chain in recent years, morphing from Buffet Mecca to Culinary Cool Town. Ours has become a veritable eating city: A-list chefs running high-brow casino chow houses, restaurants bringing home hardware from prestigious food awards (James Beard Foundation, Esquire), master sommeliers sprouting like, well, sprouts. Luxury lifestyle magazine the Robb Report recently rated this America's best dining city. College president Jennifer White says the school will further promulgate that status by creating a culinary proving ground and talent factory. Shortly after opening enrollment in January, she says, Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse called looking to poach the ranks, and star chef Michael Mina (Aqua in Bellagio, Nobhill and Seablue in MGM Grand) recently agreed to be a board member. That Cordon Bleu chose Vegas to house its first standalone U.S. campus stands as testament to Vegas' arrival, White says.
A few feet away, stewards swirl caramel around metal bowls, dipping fingertips in, tasting, then showering nuts on awaiting green apples. Because this is a constantly evolving food city, chief instructor Heinz Lauer says, "There is always a need for trained professionals."
Himself poached from the Las Vegas Club, where he was director of food operations, Lauer has cooked in foreign hotels and on cruise ships around the world. Escaping two-hour commutes as an instructor at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, he came here three years ago to work as executive sous chef at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Though six months from graduating, the inaugural class is continually tapped. At the Marriott for a dinner party. Helping Venetian cooks prepare 10,000 meals for a function. Recruited for externships—even before some know how to really cook.
"We need this school," Lauer says, "because we just don't train a lot of professional chefs here."
And train you will. On the way to earning an associates of occupational science degree, students also learn about Nevada history and political sciences—non sequitur courses mandated by state. They do so in classes of no larger than 40 students. And in specialty kitchens: two for baking and pastry-making, one for culinary skills, one for cold foods (salads and sandwiches), another for demonstration (butchering chicken and filleting salmon).
In the library, Me Ray Shook and Angeles Fabrizio, coated in white Cordon Bleu jackets with their names embroidered on the right breast, are studying food science homework: mysteries worthy of Einstein, like what makes flour rise, what does yeast do, and why doesn't milk boil. It's cooking meets microbiology. Shook, who has a catering business, is here because she wants to be a restaurant owner again, this time with an insider's knowledge about what her chefs are doing. She loves the school. "I missed two classes and was heartbroken," she says. "Anyone can cook, but it takes a lot to be a certified professional chef, and that's my goal."
Headed to Mexico to study cooking before hearing about LCB, Fabrizio lauds the faculty, many of them tapped from high-profile gigs like director of education Susan Roe, who came from Bellagio.
Back inside the main kitchen, civilians lob cookies in their mouths and gobble caramel apples. Matthew Poe retreats to the stove, adjusts the temperature and spoons through a bowl of caramel, smoothing it out. A sous chef at the Café Siena in the Suncoast, he's glad to back in school and welcomes the grind as a chance to boost the quality of his food—anything to get better after 16 years in the kitchen. Across the kitchen, Karli Goetsch is sporting a dimply cheese grin—she just completed food-safety certification; one step closer to that bakery and pastry shop.
After the tour, some of the visitors mumble about the intense curriculum. Do they have the right stuff? Not all the students will be chefs, Lauer says; some might become food writers, stylists or reviewers, others might work on cruise ships or in food and beverage management or research and development. Regardless, he says, they'll go in prepared.
"It's not: 'Hi, Chef, here I am, entertain me'," he says. "We don't have any part-time students here. It's hard work."