The Chef Business
February 26, 2008
By Martha Thomas
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When she was a student at the Culinary Institute of America 20 years ago, Cindy Wolf was sitting around with a bunch of classmates when one of them said she wanted to work eventually as a food stylist. Wolf, now executive chef and co-owner of Baltimore’s Charleston Group, was surprised. “I’d never heard of such a thing,” she recalls. She assumed that, like her, everyone at the upstate New York culinary school aimed to run a restaurant kitchen.
Back then, Wolf was probably right. The two-year program “was all about cooking,” she says. A few “front of the house” classes and a math course were offered, but that was it for the business side of the restaurant business, says Wolf, whose group is made up of Charleston, Petit Louis, Pazo, Bin 604 Wine Sellers and the new Cinghiale.
Today, most culinary schools offer four-year programs that emphasize not just the art but also the business of running a restaurant. It’s not all about wearing a toque and whisking roux. Graduates become everything from food stylists (who arrange food for films and photo shoots) to personal chefs to cookbook and travel writers.
In January 2007, Baltimore International College began offering a master’s degree in hospitality management, which grew out of the four-year degree program the college started in the mid-1990s, says Susan Hendee, dean of academic studies.
Culinary schools have changed in other ways, Hendee says. “When I was a student in 1974, I was one of eight women in 200 students,” she says. The BIC master’s program enrollment today is about 70 percent women. Hendee points out that the advanced degree is available only in hospitality management, and is more MBA than chef training. But even chefs known for their artistry would not dispute the value of a nuts-and-bolts education in the business of hospitality.
It was her business savvy as much as her creative cooking that got Cindy Wolf noticed by her superiors. She was hired by Washington’s Capital Restaurant Concepts to turn around a restaurant that was running in the red. “Everything in the kitchen is a business decision, whether it’s time to replace the air-handling unit or how we price a dish,” Wolf says.
Gayle Brier laughs when she considers some culinary school graduates she encounters. “They think they’re going to walk into a kitchen with a prep chef that has already julienned all the vegetables and just say, ‘Hmm, what shall I cook today?’” Brier owns Brasserie Tatin with her husband, Gerard Billebault, a pastry chef and boulanger. The couple also owns a commercial bakery, The French Oven, and Bonjour, a pastry shop on Falls Road. They plan to open a fourth business, a French-inspired sandwich shop in Harbor East.
Brier, like Wolf, splits the business with her husband, though the roles are reversed. Wolf’s husband and business partner, Tony Foreman, runs just about every aspect of the four restaurants (and wine shop) in the Charleston Group that is not food-related. Brier does the marketing and table-hopping and deals with most of the business matters.
“It’s helpful to have this kind of partnership,” Brier says, though she admits that business is not her favorite subject. Nevertheless, she knows that managing a budget is critical to success. “You have to be an artist feeding 150 people a night and make money doing it while creating esoteric and quality foods,” says Brier, an English major who started her career in food-related marketing and public relations.
While men have traditionally occupied the top job in the kitchen (with plenty of exceptions, Wolf included), the role of pastry chef has traditionally drawn a higher percentage of women (Gerard Billebault excepted). Lucie Yeakel, who graduated from BIC in 2004, opened Patisserie Lucie in Havre de Grace a year later. She moved to Maryland from Montreal, where she organized catering for film companies and Formula One racing events.
When she moved here, Yeakel missed the baked goods of French Montreal. “Croissants here are too doughy,” she laments. “It’s a three-day process to make a proper flaky, buttery croissant.”
Yeakel says that she dreamed of opening a coffee shop and decided to combine that with her passion for authentic French baked goods. She completed two degrees at BIC in three semesters. “The degree is a plus,” she says. “It’s important to combine scholarship with practical experience.”
Nancy Longo has been a college instructor and a chef. She attended BIC (which at the time was called Baltimore International Culinary College) in the early 1980s and did everything from cooking for a terminally ill man to working as a chef for Barry Levinson and crew during the shooting of the film Liberty Heights. In 1989 she opened Pierpoint, one of the first high-end restaurants in Fells Point.
Longo also has been an activist, founding CRAB (Chefs and Restaurants, Advocates of the Bay), which got chefs — including Paul Prudhomme and Alice Waters — together for fund-raisers whose proceeds went to the Chesapeake Bay Trust.
She opened Longo’s in Greenspring Station in 2006, a short-lived spin-off of Pierpoint. These days, Pierpoint is part of the bustle of Fells Point. Weekends are especially busy, but Longo has branched out to do catering and event planning. She also runs cooking classes for children and adults, notably a summer cooking camp for 11- to 17-year-olds. The classes involve learning about soup stock and roux, working with knives and kitchen equipment, baking and making chocolate truffles. Four of her young protégés have gone on to culinary school.
Says Longo: “My attitude with teaching is, I don’t want to teach them how to make gingerbread houses; I’m trying to teach a life skill.”
Longo can be reached at 410-675-2080.
