Revival at the county line

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The Little Rock fine-dining scene was taking off in 1995 when the Arkansas Culinary School was established at Quality Foods, a respected food-distribution facility owned by Don Kirkpatrick. The curriculum at the school in those early days consisted of one day of classroom instruction per week, and an additional 40 hours of work as an apprentice to a school-approved chef. Kirkpatrick sold his business to The Performance Group in 2002 and died in 2003, but the school lived on.

In 2006, the Arkansas Culinary School became a part of Pulaski Technical College. There were 47 students in 2006; there are now almost 600. Todd Gold, the director of Pulaski Tech’s Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management Institute, oversaw that growth through the years. After graduating from culinary school in 1992, Gold came home to Little Rock to work as a sous chef and later an executive chef. Among his stops were La Scala and the adjoining Afterthought in Little Rock’s Hillcrest neighborhood (he says Northern Italian cooking is still his favorite) and Acxiom Corp., where he spent eight years as the executive chef before becoming one of the owners of the company that operates Purple Cow restaurants.

Gold is like a proud father these days as he shows off the culinary institute’s new facility near the Pulaski-Saline County line. It covers about 60,000 square feet, cost more than $16 million to build, and opened this fall. Downtown advocates made a push two years ago to have the institute built in downtown Little Rock, but the school’s board of trustees voted in December 2011 to construct the facility at its south Little Rock location adjacent to Interstate 30. Board members said the cost of building and operating a downtown facility would have been more than they had budgeted for the project.

When Arkansas residents think of that stretch of I-30, they’re likely to think of convenience stores, liquor stores, mobile-home dealerships and the dirt track at the I-30 Speedway. Indeed, windows at the back of the gleaming new culinary facility look out on a trailer park. But Gold is quick to tell visitors that the facility is “second to none. The opportunities here are endless. Our focus now is on recruiting students not only from Arkansas but also from adjoining states. We have to get the message out about what we have here.”

He points out that some private culinary schools can cost more than $60,000 for a two-year associate’s degree that can be obtained at Pulaski Tech for $14,800. The facility is energy-efficient, and Gold describes it as the only “zero-waste” culinary school in the country since everything is recycled. His standard tour for visitors involves seeing a celebrity-chef theater with a full kitchen and video equipment that allows live feeds, a wine-studies classroom with a wine storage area, a competition lab with six cooking lines and eight prep lines, a butchery lab that’s kept at 45 degrees, and a purchasing and product identification lab with four coolers and a large walk-in freezer. And that’s just the first floor. Upstairs there are two general classrooms, a technology lab, a confectionery lab, a hotel operations suite with a full hotel room for training, a bake shop, an office suite and a plush conference room that can seat 26 people.

That’s not to mention additional features such as a community education kitchen that offers outreach opportunities for the institute, a mixology lab and a dining room with an open kitchen where Thursday night dinners and Friday lunches are offered for visitors. This is not your father’s county line.

“Restaurants, tourism and hospitality are among the nation’s most profitable economic resources,” says Margaret Ellibee, Pulaski Tech’s president. “Each year billions of dollars in revenue are generated from tourists who simply want to enjoy the country’s beauty, food and regional hospitality. Just as we must train teachers to meet education requirements or train builders to construct additional facilities, we have a responsibility to train individuals to meet the demand for experts in culinary arts and hospitality management. With accreditation from the American Culinary Federation, our graduates experience the same superior training curriculum that’s offered in Chicago or New York.” Gold has deep roots in the area. His family operated Gold’s House of Fashion in downtown Little Rock for decades. He began work at age 16 as a dishwasher at Bruno’s Little Italy and worked his way up to kitchen manager before heading to the Memphis Culinary Academy in 1991. In 1997, Gold teamed up with Phillip Tappan to buy the Purple Cow restaurants. Gold is now concentrating his efforts on the institute. He believes the growth potential is enormous. Arkansas restaurants have about $3.2 billion in sales each year and employ an estimated 107,000 people, almost 9 percent of employment in the state. Restaurants are ranked in the top 10 in projected job growth during the next decade. Student placement rates at Pulaski Tech are high.

“We haven’t had the facilities before to take care of the student demand,” Gold says. “Now, we’ll have the space and facilities to recruit outside the state.” Before long, the county line might be known as much for talented chefs and fine food as it’s now known for liquor stores and Saturday night racing.

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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 12/18/2013