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

By Christina Ianzito
Sunday, February 17, 2008

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.

"The school is a Club Med," Olivon declares. "They're going to be going to their externships for six months" -- the last stage of the program involves an apprenticeship in a "real" kitchen -- "and it's going to be a shock." And then he echoes a frequent refrain about the horrors of a chef's temper: "They have to expect that they're not going to be good enough no matter what they do. It's not that you're going to make a custard and you're done. [Sometimes] you're going to make it under pressure, without the right tools, when the chef is yelling at you."

The program actually seems less Club Med than boot camp (albeit one with quiche on the menu). Goring's classmate, Vaughn Vogel, 33, a former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, finds a loose parallel to the military in that "there's a rite of passage or initiation in the culinary world where they try to test your mettle and prepare you." Sometimes, he adds, "there's talk in class about 'Going to the walk-in.' People go cry in the walk-in [refrigerator] and come back out" once they've calmed down.

Much of the drama takes place in the classroom's adjacent kitchen, a large room filled with rectangular work stations and a long row of industrial ovens, where on this cold, rainy morning the students labor in near-silent intensity. With two hours left to create his team's extravagant meal, Goring pulls a pot off the stove. It's filled with coffee beans floating in barbecue sauce, which will go with the duck. He's nervous about today, he says, tasting the mixture with a plastic spoon. "Last week we overcooked the tenderloin."

The Market Basket competition is part of the culinary arts program's Phase II, advanced kitchen training. Phase I is a 12-week crash course in the basics of searing, braising, grilling and stewing, along with knife skills, pastry techniques and sanitation -- an intense elementary education where Goring says, "everything that can go wrong did go wrong." According to Francois Dionot, L'Academie's founder, "It's like learning the notes on the piano before playing the music. Imagination and creativity, that's for later."

This second 12-week phase emphasizes speed and restaurant-style service. Three days a week, the class watches a two-hour demonstration by their teacher, and then each student cooks the same, usually quite elaborate, three-course menu, always posted in French. Friday's Market Basket is the students' primary creative outlet.

The final phase involves the six-month externship, where the students work full time in a real kitchen, including some of the best in the area, thanks in part to the school's well-connected staff. They'll earn about $10 an hour -- which by many accounts is realistic beginning pay in the industry. Lee already works nights at Citronelle, where he will later do his externship; others will end up at the Inn at Little Washington, the Blue Duck Tavern, Palena.

Despite the endless emphasis here on the downsides of the profession -- "The pay isn't great," notes admissions director Barbara Cullen. "You toil for a long time, and somebody else [the chef] gets the credit." -- the culinary arts program has doubled in size over the past few years. It's offered four times a year now instead of two, graduating 100 students a year, each of whom forks over about $26,000 in tuition.

It helps that these students know they'll be in demand when they graduate, because of the widely bemoaned lack of skilled kitchen workers to staff Washington's ever-burgeoning restaurant scene. Nora Pouillon, founder of Restaurant Nora, acknowledges she's started recruiting from other parts of the country to fill key positions and praises L'Academie's culinary education as "the best in the area." Considering the talent shortage, Pouillon says, "I take any interns that want to come."

FUTURE EMPLOYMENT IS FAR FROM ANYONE'S MIND RIGHT NOW, HOWEVER. It's 12:30, and time's up. First-course plates are rushed into the classroom next door, and teams 1 through 8 line up their dishes along the demonstration counter, which sits below a set of mirrors to reflect the countertop's goings-on. Goring and Lee are fourth to be judged, their order chosen earlier from a pack of number cards. Not bad, Goring says of the placement, but "usually they're nicer in the beginning."

They seem to be: The judges are Dionot, Olivon, and Cedric Maupillier, chef at Central Michel Richard and here as a guest. The students sit or stand quietly, watching the three wielding their forks, tasting each dish of each course thoughtfully then pronouncing their verdicts in turn. The judges nearly swoon over Team 1's steak with cherry bourbon sauce: Dionot says, "the balance of sweet, salt, sour, etc., is perfect."

But it's not Goring's day. Comments on the duck confit salad include: "It doesn't do anything for me . . . The crepe is too wet . . . The duck is dry." And later, about the flank steak course: "The mashed potato is watery," says Maupillier, arms crossed. "It's not really my kind of thing." Olivon says that the bacon is overcooked.

The dessert, at least, passes muster: The caramel cage is a pretty touch.

Goring's reaction is respectful, offering a "Thank you, chef," for every critique.

He's been accepted for his hoped-for externship, at Monocacy Crossing in Frederick, a casual-chic restaurant beloved by local foodies and wine enthusiasts that boasts "comfortable food" along the lines of "garlic- and herb-topped beef medallions wrapped with applewood-smoked bacon."

Goring is able to start working there on weekends, before the full-time stint officially begins. Though he's often consigned to prep work and making only $8 an hour, he finds, gratefully, that the chef, Rich Regan, is nothing like the ogres he's been told to expect. "Chef Regan has really taken time to explain everything that's going on," Goring says, adding enthusiastically, "We made mozzarella. I'd never done that before."

He expects to graduate in June, hopes to own his own restaurant someday and, despite all the grim warnings, has few doubts about his chosen career so far. "It's the perfect balance of hard physical activity. It's mentally challenging. I don't really know how to put it in words actually . . . There's something about it. It just kind of gets ahold of you."

Christina Ianzito is a frequent contributor to the Magazine. She can be reached at christinaianzito@yahoo.com.