Culinary careers not easy as pie

[papalolo]

I had the advantage of doing some research before I went to culinary school. I finished a graduate degree in management before so as any type A personality I researched the crap out of my next move. I went to Northwest Culinary Academy in Vancouver BC. Not only is Vancouver a food lover's Mecca, but the chefs there told me straight up before letting me apply that I was going to spend years working in the kitchen before I got anywhere with my career. One of them even suggested I sork in a restaurant kitchen before considering applying. I already had kitchen experience during college, so I knew what I was getting myself into, but it was really cool that they were trying to weed out the candidates with stars in their eyes from the get go. The school has aroun 30 students and 5 instructors and is more than anything affordable.

If your average schmuck thinks that anything with a Cordon Blue logo on it has to be good, I think they kinda deserve shelling out as much as you would for an Ivy League education. If you wanna go into the culinary profession you have to know what youre getting yourself into, how much money you'll be paid, how many years you'll be doing a job that gets you zilch in terms of respect and more importantly....You will see how worth it this whole culinary education thingy is. When you walk into a 15 crew kitchen and 13 of them are Mexicans that agreed to work and learn for next to no money, are very talented and basically run the kitchen and 2 of them went to culinary school and are doing prep at a snails pace, have band-aids on their fingers and look miserable earning 8.50 an hour...All I'm saying is it makes you think- you cant make a career decision based on a seeing a chef on TV and thinking you'd look cute in a chefs tunic...If that was the case, I'd be an astronaut.