Second Course

A former military man cooks up a new life for himself at L'Academie de Cuisine

WITH SHAKING HANDS, MICAH GORING, 29, carefully puckers up a duck confit-filled crepe and ties it into a neat little purse with a strip of scallion. His cheeks flushed, he perches it on a bed of greens while his cooking partner, Adrian Lee, 22, gets ready to carry the plate out into the classroom. A teaching assistant, Jennifer Tye, shouts at Lee, "Move . . . You have 20 seconds left!"

The message since classes began last July has been clear: If you can't stand the heat, don't study at L'Academie de Cuisine, much less dream of a career in the kitchen. On this November day, Micah and his 15 classmates are in the midst of an intensive year-long program at the small cooking school in Gaithersburg, an education heavy with stress-inducing tests to prepare students for the hard-knock life of kitchen work. The group includes 10 men and six women ages 22 to 40, from backgrounds that range from record-producing to real estate to the military. All are presumably motivated to stick it out because of the school's reputation for generating a steady stream of grads who have gone on to transform the local culinary scene or at least work at some of the best restaurants in town, including Greggory Hill, owner and chef at David Greggory, and Janis McLean, executive chef at Morrison-Clark Restaurant.

Goring, stocky and low-key, with an easy laugh, left behind a six-year career with the Air Force that toward the end grew too administrative. "It was a different kind of pressure . . . meeting timelines and stuff like that," he says, comparing his last job, working on the computer network at Bolling Air Force Base, to the intensity of cooking school.

The pressure in the kitchen has proved to be a lot more dramatic. Today, as on most Fridays, the students have an "Iron Chef"-style challenge called Market Basket. Divided into eight teams of two, the class must create a three-course meal based on three ingredients chosen by their teacher, Patrice Olivon, former executive chef at the French Embassy and a onetime "Iron Chef" contestant. Yesterday Olivon told the class what those ingredients would be -- duck confit, flank steak and eggs -- and early this morning the eight teams will take turns meeting with him to discuss their menus.

Goring, who lives in Germantown with his wife, Katy, arrived here at 7:15 to construct the detailed menu. Like his classmates, he's dressed in clean chef whites and a white neck kerchief. By 9:30, it's his and Lee's turn to stand and face Olivon over the demonstration kitchen's counter, which stretches along the front of the now-empty classroom. They describe their idea for the second course: flank steak roulade with a spicy harissa, along with sauteed spinach, bacon strips and roasted-garlic mashed potatoes on the side and hollandaise sauce on the beef.

Chef Olivon, a small, stern-but-kind Frenchman with unruly gray hair, grimaces at this last bit -- pouring on the sauce. "That's going to be disgusting-looking," he tells them. They quickly decide to serve the hollandaise on the side. Olivon listens skeptically and dispenses further advice regarding their even more complicated dessert: a "floating island," as they put it, of whipped egg whites and sugar, poached, surrounded by creme anglaise and set inside a "cage" made of hardened caramel. When the pair finally heads back to the kitchen, with only three hours before the judging begins, Olivon sighs. "This team," he says, "they always try to go complicated . . . I'm afraid it's not going to come out the way we discussed."

THIS WASN'T WHERE GORING IMAGINED HE'D BE 10 YEARS AGO, when he was 19 and studying political science and economics at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He was drawn to the military, he explains, because, "I was always the red-blooded American type who wanted to defend the country."

That patriotism was amplified, he thinks, by where he grew up: in Indonesia, under Suharto's authoritarian rule, in an area called Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. His parents were young Christian missionaries with the Florida-based New Tribes Mission, an evangelical group whose objective is to bring churches to remote areas of the world. Goring grew up with a mix of home-schooling and study at the village's missionary school, in a class of seven children. He got periodic doses of Midwestern America -- and a taste for football -- when the family would return to Wisconsin every four years to reconnect with relatives. His older sister, Jaci, 33, now lives in Illinois, while his parents are in Florida but still travel for the church.

When asked if he's religious, Goring says "yes," with a self-conscious chuckle. But, he adds, "I never felt called to be a missionary."

After graduating from the Air Force Academy, he spent time in Okinawa, Japan, assigned to "deployable communications" and other jobs, finally ending up in Washington working on computer systems. He loved the Air Force, he says, but that last assignment -- not so exciting.

Goring's interest in cooking was roused only in the past few years. "This is really cheesy sounding," he says, "but I started watching the Food Network." He fell for "Emeril Live" and Paula Deen, and "started reading all the books I could find about what it was like to be a cook and what it was like to be in the kitchen" ( Heat, Kitchen Confidential and The Soul of a Chef), "and the more I read about it, the more fascinating it sounded; and the more people tried to talk me out of it, the more I wanted to do it."

Although the instructors at L'Academie don't exactly try to talk the students out of the profession, they do warn them constantly about how spirit-crushing restaurant kitchens can be.