On the fourth day of the spring quarter at Kendall College students in its culinary school were already hard at work learning to make sauce Portugaise, assemble vegetable terrines, and laminate dough for turnovers and croissants–192 layers of butter and dough for the croissants, 432 for the puff pastry. In Frank Chlumsky’s Introduction to Professional Cooking, 15 entry-level students clustered in the fifth-floor auditorium and demo kitchen as he gave a brisk rundown of the differences in standard menu structures, pricing, and terminology. Two floors below, in the school’s dining room kitchen, Ambarish Lulay directed his soon-to-graduate students in the production of a completely new menu for the school’s Zagat-rated restaurant. Watching the sober, white-jacketed chefs in training as they navigated the hustle and bustle of the gleaming new kitchen, it was hard to believe that only a few years ago Kendall was in serious trouble.
In business and in life Tullman is a notorious detail hound, with so many fingers in so many pots it’s hard to keep track of them all. He’s been a lawyer and a horse breeder. He’s produced a Broadway musical and written a (still unsold) screenplay. He’s famous for 3 AM e-mails and a blunt, often profane management style. He’s run 12 marathons and maintains an exhaustive Web site (tullman.com) chronicling his various other activities and enthusiasms. It includes an archive of his art holdings, a five-page resume, articles on his business dealings, pictures of his large collection of Pez dispensers, an alphabetically organized section of sayings titled “Words of Wisdom,” the syllabus for an entrepreneurship class he teaches at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, photos of himself and his wife, Judy, at the Clinton White House, and the text of the toast he gave at his daughter Jamie’s wedding.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Other than the Kellogg class, Tullman had no experience in education before he came to Kendall. As he’s fond of saying, he was brought to Kendall “to save it, sell it, or shut it down,” which is above all a business challenge. “The school had a great culinary school and a great reputation,” he says, “and it was kind of trapped inside the body of this giant, unwieldy, unworkable institution that was trying to do a lot of different things and doing most of them fairly poorly. My interest was in whether you could extract what was valuable, in terms of what the school did well, and focus on those things. Then maybe you could save it.”
Tullman’s turbocharged style didn’t sit well with everyone. Mike Artlip, the culinary school’s associate’s degree program chair, is a 29-year Kendall vet. In his role as chair of the faculty senate he acted as a buffer between the new president and the faculty and remembers being in Tullman’s office on an almost daily basis. “He was very abrupt, and he probably could have been more diplomatic, but he didn’t feel the need to be. He bent a few egos, but he felt like he had a job to get done.”
The new teaching kitchens were outfitted with industry innovations like programmable ovens and rolling blast chillers, which are essentially reverse convection ovens that rapidly cool food by blowing cold air around at high speeds–important, says Koetke, given ever-more-stringent FDA regulations. Two demo kitchens double as TV studios used to produce both in-house teaching videos and instructional DVDs for various clients. The wine classroom is outfitted with a wall of one-way glass for use in focus groups. Two baking and pastry kitchens feature industrial-strength mixers, dough cutters, and steam-injected ovens. The sugar and chocolate kitchen has cool granite countertops and ice cream machines. In the third-floor garde-manger kitchen–dedicated to the creation of cold items like pates, terrines, and charcuterie–a hefty Enviropak smoker has replaced the jury-rigged Peking-duck oven students had used for years when learning how to cure sausage.
Even something as humble as the pastry kitchens’ electromagnetic CookTek induction burners reflect Kendall’s new emphasis on what the suits call synergy. The students benefit from the state-of-the-art equipment because, in an industry ever more reliant on technology, it makes them competitive in the marketplace. (One student who started off in Evanston isn’t completely sold on the concept, noting that there are benefits to learning on old equipment because, frankly, “that’s what a lot of restaurants have.”) Koetke says the industry benefits because “here you’ve got 500 culinary students–high-quality students who are going to do things in the business. If I was a manufacturer I would want to get my best stuff in a place like this because–guess what?–they’re going to learn to cook on that stuff and they’re going to go out in the industry and when its their turn to buy stuff who are they going to think of?”
Garde-manger instructor Pierre Checchi says a lot of students–both career changers and those fresh out of high school–come in wanting to be the next Food Network star. He tries to disabuse them of that notion. “They all want to work in restaurants,” he says. “They all want to be the next Emeril or Charlie Trotter. They don’t realize that these are the exceptions.”
