Advice from Dorothy Cann Hamilton, Founder of the French Culinary Institute

A lifelong Francophile and epicure, Dorothy Cann Hamilton founded the French Culinary Institute in 1984. Her distinguished career in vocational education and her outstanding reputation for innovative programs in gastronomy have resulted in numerous accolades and tributes, including the Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite and Chevalier du Mérite Agricole, awarded by the French government. Hamilton has also received the coveted Silver Spoon Award from Food Arts magazine, marking her as a leader in the American restaurant community.

Being a chef is a lot like being an artist, maybe even a fashion designer—it’s something you know pretty much early on in your life. I don’t think you would take an aptitude test and then find out you should be a chef. Nobody goes to a cooking school because they just like to cook. That’s a different kind of school. They go to a cooking school because they want to be a chef or they want to be a food stylist or they want to be a food writer. They have a job in mind. Most cooking schools are vocational schools, so they have a responsibility to help place you in your first job.

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Cooking schools are quite expensive because the equipment and the food to teach you are very expensive. There are a lot of costs in cooking schools, but if you have a decent credit rating, you can borrow enough money to go to school. If you do that, though, I can understand how anybody would want to be cautious. Ask, “What type of job am I going to get when I get out of this school?” Ask the school to show you their placement rate for the last year, where their graduates are working today. The school should have that record keeping. You should look and make sure that the school is licensed—better yet, that it’s accredited by the federal government. Another thing you can do is call the state education department and the Better Business Bureau in your area and ask if any complaints have been filed against that school. If you’re going to make this kind of investment, you’re really going to have to do your homework before you go.

Do Your Research

There are a lot of questions that people should ask when they’re looking at a cooking school. One is, “What is the curriculum?” You don’t want to go to a school where they just throw a chef in the classroom and say, “Teach.” You may not get a well-rounded education on everything because perhaps they didn’t like doing fish sauté or something like that, or they’re not particularly good in pastry so they don’t bother with that either. You should look for a school that has an established faculty with chefs who have been trained specifically for teaching.

The other thing you have to look into is the backgrounds of the teachers, as chefs. The difference between a good and a great restaurant is a lot of finesse and understanding the subtleties and its little things. Anyone can teach you how to hold a knife. It’s from the very first day; it’s learning the attitude, it’s learning how to use your eyes and your nose and getting your basic training from the very best, which is so important.

Aside from the teachers, their background, and their personal communication skills and teaching background, I think you have to look at how well equipped the school is. Do they use really good equipment, or are you going to be hampered by using mediocre equipment that breaks down or is not professional equipment that you would find in a real kitchen when you go out to work? You can really tell how good a school is when you look at the ingredients used. Do they buy cheap meat so no matter how you cook it, it’s never going to taste good? Are you going to learn lobster or are you going to cook chicken all the time? When you frost a cake, are they going to give you real cake, or are you going to use styrofoam? How organized is the school; how clean is the school? Do they have one dishwasher? Kitchens have to be spotless, and that’s part of your training; it’s learning about that cleanliness. So if you go in and [the kitchen] looks rough and tumble, you’re not going to be getting a very essential part of chef training.

Eat Abroad if You Can

Even if you’re going to stay in cooking school in the United States, you should try in your life to take vacations abroad and eat abroad because it will stimulate your imagination and make you a much more profound cook. It just opens up your eyes and your taste buds. Culturally, the way people eat is different everywhere in the world. That being said, there are some real reasons, if you are going to be a professional, to learn in the United States. One, the equipment is different. Two, the products are different—it’s very hard for a European to come over here and make pastry or bread because the flour is so different. Three, American taste buds are different. In America, even at the French Culinary Institute, we serve much larger portions than they would ever serve in France. So if you’re going to look to ever be a professional, there are a lot of reasons to learn in the vernacular here what you can do.

• Are you in cooking school? Do you dream of being a chef? Add a comment, start a conversation!

Reality Check

When you get out of cooking school, usually the best jobs pay the least money. There are people who would go work for free for chefs like Jean-Georges, so they don’t have to pay a lot to their entry-level workers. It really depends what kind of job you’re looking for, but any entry-level job is not going to be highly paid. I think it can be anywhere from $18,000 to $30,000 for a first job, depending on where you want to go and what you want to do. But quite quickly, one year to two years after that, it ramps up dramatically. We did a survey a number of years ago and [found that] 5 years out, our average student was making $40,000 a year, and 10 years out, they were making over $75,000 in executive-chef positions. An entry-level position would be a cook. It doesn’t sound glamorous, but there’s a difference between a short-order cook and a professional cook who is going into a real operation and starting up the career ladder.

Roles in the Kitchen

A cook will come in and the first thing they have to do is get their station ready, which is called mise en place, French for “put in place.” You get all your seasonings out, get all of your knives out. You get your cutting boards, your towels, and you get yourself ready. Then you get all your products. In a way, a kitchen is set up very militaristically; there are stations. Chef, you know, means “chief,” and the executive chef is the general. After that, you have the sous-chef, which is the captain, and then you have the meat station, the dessert station, and the appetizer/salad station, and then you’ll have a chef at each of those stations with their lieutenants. Under them are the sergeants and privates doing the work.

So if you come in, you are the private; so you’re going to get the grunt work, like peeling the carrots, cleaning the fish, seasoning the fish, getting ready for the lieutenant in that area to sauté it all. Then you’re going to start working up that ladder—making dough, preparing in the pastry kitchen making tarts, putting whipped cream on top of things. Depending on the size of the kitchen, an executive chef would or wouldn’t do the cooking. An executive chef in a small kitchen would, but an executive chef at a large hotel is what we call a “pencil chef.” He’s got thousands and thousands of people to feed and [is] just organizing the labor pool, doing the food ordering, making the menus, checking in that it’s all going out, and tasting it. He doesn’t have time; he couldn’t possibly cook.