Karen Sylvester
DOUBLE DUTY John-Conrad Ste. Marthe, once the chef for Bill Cosby and his family, cooks by day and goes to Monroe College at night.
At 54, he is easily one of the oldest undergraduates at Monroe College. He is also one of the nattiest. He usually dresses in a suit, perhaps his navy pinstripe, and a Panama hat.
Since September of last year, Mr. Ste. Marthe has been working toward a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management on top of his associate’s degree from the Culinary Institute of America. He cooks by day for the family of a financier with homes in Manhattan and Southampton (yes, he spends the summer) and goes to class on weeknights and Saturday mornings at Monroe’s Bronx and New Rochelle campuses, and online. He expects to graduate in April. He knows he can cook. But manage a restaurant? Create a spreadsheet? Do accounting?
In spring 2008, Mr. Ste. Marthe worked for a small New York hedge fund, managing the kitchen and dining room and planning menus. The food costs alone for 100 employees’ breakfast and lunch, five days a week, was $60,000 a month. “I had to find an accountant to teach me how to prepare a spreadsheet, so I can identify the areas where we could reduce our costs,” says Mr. Ste. Marthe, who discovered a lot of waste in “ordering too many eggs and fruit, so it spoiled.” He cut costs to $45,000. But Wall Street crashed and the job ended.
He began looking for jobs. He wanted to go into hotel or restaurant management, to move away from being a private chef and traveling with families (Mr. Cosby had five homes, and a private aircraft the chef stewarded). He wanted to stay put. “Every time I applied for a job,” Mr. Ste. Marthe says, “the responses were, ‘You have a great background, great experience, but you don’t have management experience.’ ”
Ambitious chefs no longer just cook. “As you move up, you do less cooking,” explains Frederic Mayo, a clinical professor of hospitality and tourism management at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. “You need more skills than cooking skills — more accounting, more marketing, more management.” And it’s no longer enough to arm yourself with an associate’s degree in classical cooking techniques. Culinary entrepreneurs are going back for bachelor’s degrees in hospitality management to learn food and beverage management, the financial aspects of the business, and marketing and sales. If you are a student without a culinary background, the four-year programs may offer a few courses in cooking, but don’t expect to become top chef.
To usher cooks into the business world, and business people into the culinary world, the Culinary Institute of America and Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration have created a joint program in which juniors at Cornell, where there is no cooking, can spend a year at the C.I.A., as the institute is called. In turn, C.I.A. students who are accepted into Cornell’s hospitality management bachelor’s program get credit for their associate’s degree.
“You can go into hospitality management without culinary training,” says Peter Rainsford, the vice president for academic affairs at the C.I.A. “But the Cornellians who go into hospitality are relying on someone else for the culinary expertise. The pure culinarian who understands the food and flavor profiles and food preparation can partner with someone with the business skills.” The dual program offers “the best of both worlds,” he says.
Mr. Ste. Marthe, formerly a pure culinarian, is aiming to master the second skill set. Monroe, which offers an associate’s degree from its new culinary arts center, gave Mr. Ste. Marthe credit for most of his C.I.A. courses, including food and beverage management, baking and pastry arts. It also waived its required internship.
To find a program, Mr. Ste. Marthe had collected catalogs from the nearest schools offering a degree in hospitality management, including New York City College of Technology, in Brooklyn, and New York University. (The C.I.A., in Hyde Park, N.Y., and Cornell, in Ithaca, were too far away.) “I could benefit more from going to a more prestigious school,” he acknowledges, “but my finances are limited, and with my work schedule Monroe seemed to be my best choice.” With $1,100 in grants from the college for his 3.6 grade-point average, the cost of the degree will come to $18,000. While private chefs make $60,000 and up (and Mr. Ste. Marthe is at the high end), he has had to take out federal loans in the amount of $15,520, about half of that need-based.
Another factor in his choice was the New Rochelle campus, which is close to Mount Vernon, N.Y., where Mr. Ste. Marthe lives with his wife and two children.
FOR Mr. Ste. Marthe, spontaneous continuing education, whether for a degree or a weeklong internship, has been a leitmotif to his life.
“We were very poor,” he remembers. He was raised with three brothers in St. Lucia by a single mother, a cook at a European-style bistro called the Calabash. At home, food was meager. His mother made stews of dried cod, soaked with tomatoes and onions. Off to work, “she’d leave maybe curry chicken, or sometimes it would be just bread and some tea for us to heat up,” he says. At the restaurant, he would see how the nonpoor ate. “The hamburger, beautiful sliced tomatoes. Everything was fresh and lively. There was very low music, people were happy. It had an impression on me.”
At 18, he got his first food-related job on a yacht, as an assistant to a local chef, who taught him mise en place. Eighteen months later he went to work as a steward on a 105-foot yacht used by Robert H. Abplanalp, who had made a fortune designing a revolutionary aerosol spray valve but is best known as a loyal friend to Richard M. Nixon (whom Mr. Ste. Marthe did meet). The man who owned a private island in the Bahamas befriended the young Caribbean islander.
When Mr. Abplanalp asked Mr. Ste. Marthe what he wanted to do in his life, the answer was to go to the Culinary Institute of America and become a chef. Mr. Abplanalp paid tuition, room and board for Mr. Ste. Marthe, who worked as a janitor and dishwasher to earn spending money.
“I fitted right in,” he says. “I had discovered my passion, and the most startling thing was my first winter. I didn’t have the clothes. One of my first classes was ice carving outside, and I didn’t last too long.” He found an Army Navy store and bought sweaters and long johns. “I kept the heat so high in my room that my roommate, as soon as I fell asleep, he opened the window.”
He did his student externship at Regine’s with Larry Forgione, who then hired Mr. Ste. Marthe as a line chef at the River Café in Brooklyn. “You could tell he had a great sense of emotion about his cooking,” Mr. Forgione says.
But Mr. Ste. Marthe, who also worked at Espace near Union Square, missed the closeness of working with families, and when he heard one was looking for a chef, he sent the butler a résumé. He was called a week later to try out, by making a bouillabaise and salad for a family of four. It was the Cosbys. After three tryouts, Mr. Ste. Marthe was offered the job, which he held from 1990 until he set out on his own in 2003.
Private chefs typically prepare two meals a day, and a day can last from noon to 10 p.m. The key to success, Mr. Ste. Marthe says, is to please the families, “to provide foods of their choice, and to be as flexible as possible in meeting their needs.” Mr. Cosby’s favorite dish was a traditional bouillabaisse, and he sent Mr. Ste. Marthe to Le Bacon, the restaurant on the Côte d’Azur, to learn from the source.
Mr. Cosby and his wife, Camille, helped Mr. Ste. Marthe continue his education with a number of such one- to two-week internships; one was at Le Cirque, where the owner, Sirio Maccioni, is a friend of the Cosbys’. “What you don’t see, you don’t know, and you’re not able to build on what you don’t know,” Mr. Cosby says. “So the friends Mrs. Cosby and I had made over the years opened their doors to Conrad. Not everyone working for someone is willing to go to a higher level. A person’s self-esteem may not allow the person to challenge him or herself, so they will say, ‘I’m just fine where I am.’ Conrad jumped right in.”
Le Cirque has a tradition of taking interns. “The mentality of a good restaurateur is to let young people come in,” Mr. Maccioni says.
Mr. Ste. Marthe, too, wants to work with the young, and might even teach at a culinary school. “It’s important to have a B.A,” he says. “I don’t want to stop at management. I want to work with young people, and let them see someone like myself from a humble island kind of background can be passionate about cooking and pursue it.”
As Mr. Cosby says, “Conrad believes in himself.”
Since September of last year, Mr. Ste. Marthe has been working toward a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management on top of his associate’s degree from the Culinary Institute of America. He cooks by day for the family of a financier with homes in Manhattan and Southampton (yes, he spends the summer) and goes to class on weeknights and Saturday mornings at Monroe’s Bronx and New Rochelle campuses, and online. He expects to graduate in April. He knows he can cook. But manage a restaurant? Create a spreadsheet? Do accounting?
In spring 2008, Mr. Ste. Marthe worked for a small New York hedge fund, managing the kitchen and dining room and planning menus. The food costs alone for 100 employees’ breakfast and lunch, five days a week, was $60,000 a month. “I had to find an accountant to teach me how to prepare a spreadsheet, so I can identify the areas where we could reduce our costs,” says Mr. Ste. Marthe, who discovered a lot of waste in “ordering too many eggs and fruit, so it spoiled.” He cut costs to $45,000. But Wall Street crashed and the job ended.
He began looking for jobs. He wanted to go into hotel or restaurant management, to move away from being a private chef and traveling with families (Mr. Cosby had five homes, and a private aircraft the chef stewarded). He wanted to stay put. “Every time I applied for a job,” Mr. Ste. Marthe says, “the responses were, ‘You have a great background, great experience, but you don’t have management experience.’ ”
Ambitious chefs no longer just cook. “As you move up, you do less cooking,” explains Frederic Mayo, a clinical professor of hospitality and tourism management at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. “You need more skills than cooking skills — more accounting, more marketing, more management.” And it’s no longer enough to arm yourself with an associate’s degree in classical cooking techniques. Culinary entrepreneurs are going back for bachelor’s degrees in hospitality management to learn food and beverage management, the financial aspects of the business, and marketing and sales. If you are a student without a culinary background, the four-year programs may offer a few courses in cooking, but don’t expect to become top chef.
To usher cooks into the business world, and business people into the culinary world, the Culinary Institute of America and Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration have created a joint program in which juniors at Cornell, where there is no cooking, can spend a year at the C.I.A., as the institute is called. In turn, C.I.A. students who are accepted into Cornell’s hospitality management bachelor’s program get credit for their associate’s degree.
“You can go into hospitality management without culinary training,” says Peter Rainsford, the vice president for academic affairs at the C.I.A. “But the Cornellians who go into hospitality are relying on someone else for the culinary expertise. The pure culinarian who understands the food and flavor profiles and food preparation can partner with someone with the business skills.” The dual program offers “the best of both worlds,” he says.
Mr. Ste. Marthe, formerly a pure culinarian, is aiming to master the second skill set. Monroe, which offers an associate’s degree from its new culinary arts center, gave Mr. Ste. Marthe credit for most of his C.I.A. courses, including food and beverage management, baking and pastry arts. It also waived its required internship.
To find a program, Mr. Ste. Marthe had collected catalogs from the nearest schools offering a degree in hospitality management, including New York City College of Technology, in Brooklyn, and New York University. (The C.I.A., in Hyde Park, N.Y., and Cornell, in Ithaca, were too far away.) “I could benefit more from going to a more prestigious school,” he acknowledges, “but my finances are limited, and with my work schedule Monroe seemed to be my best choice.” With $1,100 in grants from the college for his 3.6 grade-point average, the cost of the degree will come to $18,000. While private chefs make $60,000 and up (and Mr. Ste. Marthe is at the high end), he has had to take out federal loans in the amount of $15,520, about half of that need-based.
Another factor in his choice was the New Rochelle campus, which is close to Mount Vernon, N.Y., where Mr. Ste. Marthe lives with his wife and two children.
FOR Mr. Ste. Marthe, spontaneous continuing education, whether for a degree or a weeklong internship, has been a leitmotif to his life.
“We were very poor,” he remembers. He was raised with three brothers in St. Lucia by a single mother, a cook at a European-style bistro called the Calabash. At home, food was meager. His mother made stews of dried cod, soaked with tomatoes and onions. Off to work, “she’d leave maybe curry chicken, or sometimes it would be just bread and some tea for us to heat up,” he says. At the restaurant, he would see how the nonpoor ate. “The hamburger, beautiful sliced tomatoes. Everything was fresh and lively. There was very low music, people were happy. It had an impression on me.”
At 18, he got his first food-related job on a yacht, as an assistant to a local chef, who taught him mise en place. Eighteen months later he went to work as a steward on a 105-foot yacht used by Robert H. Abplanalp, who had made a fortune designing a revolutionary aerosol spray valve but is best known as a loyal friend to Richard M. Nixon (whom Mr. Ste. Marthe did meet). The man who owned a private island in the Bahamas befriended the young Caribbean islander.
When Mr. Abplanalp asked Mr. Ste. Marthe what he wanted to do in his life, the answer was to go to the Culinary Institute of America and become a chef. Mr. Abplanalp paid tuition, room and board for Mr. Ste. Marthe, who worked as a janitor and dishwasher to earn spending money.
“I fitted right in,” he says. “I had discovered my passion, and the most startling thing was my first winter. I didn’t have the clothes. One of my first classes was ice carving outside, and I didn’t last too long.” He found an Army Navy store and bought sweaters and long johns. “I kept the heat so high in my room that my roommate, as soon as I fell asleep, he opened the window.”
He did his student externship at Regine’s with Larry Forgione, who then hired Mr. Ste. Marthe as a line chef at the River Café in Brooklyn. “You could tell he had a great sense of emotion about his cooking,” Mr. Forgione says.
But Mr. Ste. Marthe, who also worked at Espace near Union Square, missed the closeness of working with families, and when he heard one was looking for a chef, he sent the butler a résumé. He was called a week later to try out, by making a bouillabaise and salad for a family of four. It was the Cosbys. After three tryouts, Mr. Ste. Marthe was offered the job, which he held from 1990 until he set out on his own in 2003.
Private chefs typically prepare two meals a day, and a day can last from noon to 10 p.m. The key to success, Mr. Ste. Marthe says, is to please the families, “to provide foods of their choice, and to be as flexible as possible in meeting their needs.” Mr. Cosby’s favorite dish was a traditional bouillabaisse, and he sent Mr. Ste. Marthe to Le Bacon, the restaurant on the Côte d’Azur, to learn from the source.
Mr. Cosby and his wife, Camille, helped Mr. Ste. Marthe continue his education with a number of such one- to two-week internships; one was at Le Cirque, where the owner, Sirio Maccioni, is a friend of the Cosbys’. “What you don’t see, you don’t know, and you’re not able to build on what you don’t know,” Mr. Cosby says. “So the friends Mrs. Cosby and I had made over the years opened their doors to Conrad. Not everyone working for someone is willing to go to a higher level. A person’s self-esteem may not allow the person to challenge him or herself, so they will say, ‘I’m just fine where I am.’ Conrad jumped right in.”
Le Cirque has a tradition of taking interns. “The mentality of a good restaurateur is to let young people come in,” Mr. Maccioni says.
Mr. Ste. Marthe, too, wants to work with the young, and might even teach at a culinary school. “It’s important to have a B.A,” he says. “I don’t want to stop at management. I want to work with young people, and let them see someone like myself from a humble island kind of background can be passionate about cooking and pursue it.”
As Mr. Cosby says, “Conrad believes in himself.”
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