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In Three Decades, Roughly 200,000 Students Have Met at L'Academie de Cuisine

Jeff Heinemann, Chef & Owner of Grape Seed, is a graduate and Jasmine Gross is a current student of the academy. (Mark Finkenstaedt - For The Washington Post)

S chool reunions are rarely known for their food, but odds are the one that will take place Feb. 19 in Gaithersburg will be different. The event: the 30th-anniversary bash of L'Academie de Cuisine, the Montgomery County cooking school that last summer was named one of the 10 best in the nation.

As graduates of the school, the party-goers could be a demanding crowd. But that doesn't seem to faze the people preparing the evening's buffet meal -- all of them working chefs who are also L'Academie alumni.

"It's a blast to cook in front of peers and soon-to-be peers," says Jeff Heineman, 1992 graduate and chef-owner of the Grapeseed Bistro in Bethesda, who'll be making grilled lobster with jerk seasoning and black bean and fruit salad that night.

He will have plenty of friendly critics. L'Academie, which began as a modest enterprise for home cooks in rented space in Bethesda, has taught an estimated 195,000 people from the community. And, as the area's culinary scene became more sophisticated, the school established a professional program that has graduated 669 aspiring chefs and another 398 students from its pastry program.

Many of them stay in the area to work. All finish their training by working six months as an entry-level extern in local restaurants, a process as essential to a chef's training as student teaching is to becoming an educator. In turn, some of the area's prominent chefs teach at the school. "Students need to see different styles, different approaches and attitudes before they can create their own style," says chef Ris Lacoste, who recently left 1789 in Georgetown to start her own restaurant. "There's no way they could go to all these restaurants on their own."

Some restaurants also look to the school for professional staff development. "We've sent people there for a long time, and we've hired many graduates," says Tom Meyer, executive vice president of the Clyde's group, which owns 12 restaurants in the greater Washington area. "They do a great job of turning out high-quality, committed, talented people."

The school came into being in 1975, when a formally trained young French chef named Francois Dionot and Don Miller, an investor, saw a need for a local cooking school here -- and a business opportunity.

Back then, cooking was taught at home, from books, or, for the more committed, from Julia Child's "French Chef" television series.

Dionot sensed that people wanted instruction. "Except for Julia Child, there were no books [on French technique] that were precise," he says. Cooking classes were chic. People were spending money to go to France to take classes.

The partners rented space in Montgomery County, and Dionot began a weekly French cooking class, showing students how to prepare and present a seasonal three-course meal, then sharing it with the class. He still teaches it.

With every year, the program needed more room, first for additional teaching kitchens at the Bethesda facility and in 1985 for an additional space in Gaithersburg that has recently undergone a $1 million expansion. Courses include pastry techniques (Roland Mesnier -- then the White House pastry chef -- was one of the school's first teachers), dinner party meals, quick dinners, regional foods from all over the world and classes for kids. Area chefs, including Gerard Pangaud and the late Jean-Louis Palladin, whose restaurants in France earned coveted two-star ratings, have regularly employed the school's externs. "I need people who know all the basic French techniques," says Pangaud, chef-owner of Gerard's Place in downtown Washington. "In every art form you need a sound technique. But work in a busy restaurant takes a young chef way beyond those fundamentals."

One of Pangaud's prize externs was Jonathan Krinn, who after several years went on to work in New York and France before starting 2941, his much-admired restaurant in Falls Church. Krinn sees the relatively small size of the school and the externships as important to his development.

"Cooking is very physical -- it's all about learning to use your hands in a certain way, so you need a coach," he says. "There I had a coach from day one -- a teacher molding my hands."

Externs often stay on at their jobs after graduation, working their way through the different stations in a professional kitchen.

"When you have a local school, it creates stronger ties to the community and retains the chefs locally," says Meyer, the Clyde's executive. "Francois can be a matchmaker. He knows every chef in town, so he's able to place kids in a situation where they're going to succeed. And that makes everybody successful."

Last year, a Web site called CookingSchoolsCompared.com surveyed 150 food editors and industry leaders to rank culinary schools on student-teacher ratio, cost, experience level of the instructors and placement after graduation and other factors. L'Academie came out among the top 10 in the nation. Within that category, the schools were not ranked in order. It is smaller than a few of its competitors, and its roughly $23,000 tuition for a 50-week professional program is the second lowest of the top-10 schools surveyed.

Says Krinn: "I have no problem putting a L'Academie student up against a student from anywhere else in the country. Fine-dining restaurants need young, energetic cooks with good habits. I wouldn't have a staff without the school."