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'Desperate for chefs, cooks, bakers... Training is available'
Monterey County Herald, Friday, April 2, 1999

By Lisa Crawford Watson, HERALD CORRESPONDENT

Jim Culcasi decorates a cake at Rosine's.

For those ready to try their culinary kills, Monterey County is a very strong job market.

"We nave over 1,800 food venues in the county" said Patricia Rain, marketing coordinator for the California Culinary Academy of San Francisco's satellite campus, the College of Food, in Salinas.

"Because tourism is our key industry on the Peninsula, people desperately want trained chefs, cooks and bakers. The possibilities are endless."

Just ask Jim Culcasi, king of the four-layer-plus cakes that summon passersby from their shiny cases at the entrance to Rosine's restaurant in Monterey. Culcasi started working for the restaurant in 1980 when it was located in Del Monte Shopping Center and his mother, Rosine, was doing both the cooking and the baking. In 1986, the family moved their restaurant to its present location on Alvarado Street, where Culcasi eventually look his mother's recipes and began building his dessert dynasty.

"I don't always work from a recipe," he said, "sometimes it just comes over me. What I've got in these cakes is what I like to eat. I attribute my success to my sweet tooth. I am self-taught, and let me tell you, a lot of cakes fell before I perfected them. Practice makes perfect, and I've had a lot of practice."

For those who don't have the benefit of family recipes and childhood training, the culinary school offers the essential ingredients of basic professional culinary training, including basic sauces and reductions, breads and pastries, proper knife usage, meal cookery and safety and sanitation.

"To be a chef requires more than academic training," said Rain, "such as the kind of experience you get out in the field. You can approach it two ways: Go out and get training from life; work your way up the line, or go to school and then enter the field. Our school is the equivalent of the freshman semester of a four-semester program."

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