Chef Appeal
its early murmurs in the 1980s. Many are chef-inspired fantasy kitchens—or,
more accurately, fantasy-chef inspired kitchens, since most chefs don’t actually
work in such spaces.
But nowhere is the recent rise in chef appeal more seriously manifested
than in the booming business of people wanting to actually become chefs.
Increases in cooking school enrollment began to be noted in the early 1990s. At
the time, these were associated with the 1980s boom in restaurant openings—the
growth of the hospitality industry in general—which continued to strengthen in
the 1990s and into the 2000s, making the restaurant industry the largest privatesector employer in the U.S. There was a 10 percent increase in culinary school
admissions in 1991, which outpaced the average increase for all private
vocational schools by 3 percent. For the period between 2000 and 2004, the
Wall Street Journal reported a 40 percent increase in culinary-school-degreeprogram enrollment." A couple of years later, a Business Week Online feature
entitled “Cooking School Craze” announced that the Culinary Institute of
America experienced a 35 percent increase in admissions between 2001 and
2005, the French Culinary Institute saw a 59 percent increase over the same
period, and the New England Culinary Institute counted a 30 percent increase in
enrollment between 2002 and 2005.^
The story of rising enrollment could be considered just part of the
larger tale of expansion in the restaurant industry, and the product of greater
numbers of cook positions available to an increased population who are not
necessarily chef enthusiasts and might otherwise take up a variety of other
trades—except for an intriguing subplot of career-change. According to the
latest edition of Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page’s authoritative guide.
Becoming a
(2003), over 45 percent of those enrolled at the California
Culinary Academy arrived with professional backgrounds outside of the
foodservice industry. In the “Cooking School Craze” feature of three years later,
the presence of career-changers continued to be emphasized, along with their
intentions, which reportedly ranged from starting their own businesses to simply
learning to cook better. In The Reach of a C/76?/’(2006), Michael Ruhlman adds
that, at the Culinary Institute of America, the standard-bearer of culinary
education in the U.S., the demographics of ♦he student body had recently
changed in a way quite uncharacteristic of academic colleges. As many as 15 to
20 percent of the students are those who are shifting careers.
Already it is clear that there is no single portrait of chef appeal. There
are different audiences for chefs and different chefs for different audiences.
People make varying degrees of commitment to spend their money on chefinspired passions, or in how they model themselves after chefs. Some people
specialize in cooking for their friends. Others need go no further than watching
chefs on television. In 2003, the senior vice president for programming and
production at the Food Network admitted as much: “We really are two channels.
One for people who want to take ideas and do them themselves and one for
those who just want to watch people cooking.” Likewise, the rollouts of the