Teens Savor Success as Chefs in the Making

His chopped parsley was perfect, the judges said, but he lost points in knifing skills because he didn’t have time to finish the last vegetable.

“I messed up and didn’t get my mushrooms done,” lamented Kurt Eichenberger, 17.

Impressing master chefs isn’t easy. But months of practice on timing, technique, organization and presentation paid off for the Santa Ana High School graduate, who peeled and poached his way to the bronze medal in the first national Art Institutes’ Culinary Cook-Off competition.

Silver medalist Steve Wan, 17, of Lawndale, and Eichenberger now plan to take the $25,000 scholarships they won to pursue, at schools of their choice, advanced training in cooking.

They are among tens of thousands of Southern California high school graduates bound for a higher education experience in coming months. Wan, for example, starts school this week at the Art Institute of Los Angeles in Santa Monica and hopes to work under the tutelage of the executive chef at a country club.

“If it’s chopping vegetables, it doesn’t matter as long as I’m in the kitchen working,” the Hawthorne High graduate said.

Both teens are Eagle Scouts. Both played high school sports. But each arrived at his common dream of becoming world-class chefs by different paths.

Wan was inspired by his father, Paul, who works as a tax preparer but comes from a family in which all the men excel at cooking.

“Everyone loves his shrimp fried rice and char siu pork,” said the proud son. “They rave about his cooking, and friends and neighbors say he should go into the business.”

The younger Wan, nicknamed “Chef-Boyar-Steve” by friends, often cooks for his mother and younger brother. The other night, his mother, whom he calls Miki, requested teriyaki salmon for dinner. He garnished it with mandarin oranges and served it with sauteed vegetables.

For Eichenberger, hunger sent him to the stove. As a youngster whose parents worked long hours and attended school, he and his sister learned to fend for themselves.

“We’re a really busy family,” explained his mother, Simone Eichenberger, a community resource specialist for Santa Ana’s Regional Occupational Program. “My husband works at night; I was taking college classes. The children realized they had to eat, so they became good at preparing dinner. . . . It was kind of a gradual thing.”

Gourmet meals they were not, she recalled, laughter in her voice. The fare ranged from spaghetti to tacos to macaroni and cheese, usually prepared in the family’s narrow kitchen on a huge stove that Simone Eichenberger suspects may be 70 years old. Its oven door is held in place with a wire hanger and bungee cord; the knobs above it are stained brown from escaping heat.

“I’ve always kind of been interested in cooking since I was a little kid,” said Kurt Eichenberger, who will start at the Art Institute of Colorado, in Denver, in October.

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Jo Ann Himmelberger, a Santa Ana High teacher, said Eichenberger’s enthusiasm immediately caught her eye when he began her cooking class two years ago. This year, she found herself coaching him on weekends for the regional contest April 1 and the finals May 6.

The Art Institutes, which sponsored the event, are a 35-year-old system of 18 schools throughout the country that trains students in design, media arts, fashion and culinary skills. A total of $150,000 in scholarships was awarded during the event.

Initially, the 400 U.S. high school seniors who entered the contest had to submit notebooks containing an original menu for a two-course meal with photographs of the final product. Also required: the exact measurement of each ingredient, which a professional chef must know to calculate the price for a dish.

Wan’s menu was an appetizer of stuffed shrimp, grilled salmon with dill sauce, red potatoes and squash. Eichenberger’s was barbecue chicken with mustard seed sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, sauteed vegetables and a cabbage salad.

The 100 semifinalists were selected for 11 regional competitions and given a menu that they would prepare in front of several professional chefs, members of the prestigious American Culinary Federation.

“At first I looked at it and went, ‘Oh, my god,” Eichenberger said of the assignment: roasted chicken with mushroom sauce, rice pilaf and sauteed broccoli. “I didn’t even know what rice pilaf was,” he said. “I had no clue.”

The menu also called for a shrimp cocktail appetizer. Cynics may wonder how hard it can be to arrange shrimp with a lemon wedge on the side, but, as Eichenberger notes, presentation is everything.

“If your portion size is too large, according to the judge, it doesn’t really matter what you say,” he says. “It’s what the judge says.”

Because timing is so crucial, Himmelberger and her pupil used note cards to outline the cooking process, an idea that impressed the judges.

Eichenberger could have done his regional competition in Los Angeles, where Wan took the regional silver medal. But he chose to compete in Denver, where he won a silver medal and at least $2,000 in scholarship money. He then had one month to learn to make a crab cake appetizer, a Caesar salad and an entree of beef tenderloin in wild mushroom sauce with sauteed vegetables and roasted red potatoes.

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The final competition was held in Denver, where parents fidgeted with cameras and paced nervously as a panel of six industry professionals watched the 22 finalists from 15 states during a 3 1/2-hour cooking exercise.

Standards were exacting. The meal was for two, and both servings had to be presented at the same time, with cold plates cold, hot plates hot and the beef at exactly 115 degrees Fahrenheit. And it all had to be prepared with creativity in mind.

“They wanted something that looked edible,” Eichenberger said. “They said the better it looks, the better it tastes.”

His crab cakes, stacked to create vertical height and garnished with scrapings of yellow squash and zucchini with a twist of lemon, were among his best ever. But the tenderloins, well . . .

“The meat couldn’t be bloody, and mine was,” he said. “But at 115 degrees, it’s kind of hard for it not to be bloody.” Fortunately, the judges’ tastes tilted to the rare.

The gold medal national winner, Brent Lewis, 18, of Loveland, Colo., won $25,000 in scholarship money and a trip to New York City.