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Eat your ribeyes out, Omaha.
The city's newest kitchen boasts a combo oven that's half the size of a Buick, nearly as pricey as a Cadillac and able to grill 200 steaks at once.
This same kitchen also features a room that could make Willy Wonka jealous. It's a choco-laboratory sealed by airtight doors so the Oompa Loompas inside can tweak the heat and humidity until the climate is perfect for chocolate making.
And here's the nuttiest part — salivating foodies won't find this kitchen in a fancy new restaurant or at a fine hotel.
It's inside Metro Community College's new $16 million Institute for Culinary Arts.
The new north Omaha building and conference center opens for classes today, replacing Metro's old and cramped culinary arts building.
The new building is impressive enough to strengthen Metro's growing reputation as a Midwestern magnet for culinary education, said a veteran of Omaha's restaurant industry.
“To be honest, I figured it was going to be the same as it was before, just bigger,” John Chisholm, one of Godfather Pizza's original franchise owners, said of the new building. “And then you go in there, and it's state-of-the-art everything, so well designed. ... It's overwhelming.”
Jim Trebbien, who has directed Metro's culinary institute for 25 years, gave a recent tour of the building, leading visitors up and down the still-unfinished hallways and pointing out rooms that double as the longtime director's early Christmas presents.
To the west are two side-by-side kitchens filled with gleaming new equipment. Here, 18 beginning students at a time will learn basic cooking. Both kitchens have glassed-in western walls, so curious passers-by can peer in and watch a beef stock or a béarnaise sauce being prepared.
To the east is a bakery where Metro instructor Janet Mar will help teach experienced chefs how to better make artisian bread. Starting next year, Metro plans to offer a series of weeklong seminars to professional chefs who want to improve their skills in a specific area, such as breadmaking.
Upstairs is a 450-seat banquet room that will hold most of Metro's big events.
The second floor also holds a Food Network-style surprise — a demonstration kitchen with stadium seating, where a Metro instructor can teach a class or where culinary leaders could turn the video cameras on and tape the school's own cooking show.
“I never even imagined something like this,” Trebbien said of the building. “This is absolutely a chef's dream.”
The tour's grand finale is the main kitchen, where second-year students will prepare food for the Metro bistro.
The culinary institute has long served inexpensive dinners to the public in its old headquarters, but Trebbien suspects that the new building, with its better location on a major street, will draw in far more diners when the new 65-seat bistro opens in late January.
The most curious of those paying customers can sneak back and find the gigantic combo oven, which retails for $35,000. Metro bought it for half price because the company wanted to showcase the oven on a college campus, Trebbien said.
A couple of steps away, off the bakery, sits the chocolate laboratory, which — like the beginning kitchens and the demonstration kitchen — didn't exist in the culinary institute's old building.
The biggest-ever fundraising project in Metro's history made these bells and whistles a reality, Trebbien said. The institute raised $3.6 million for the building, with the largest chunks coming from the Pegler Family Foundation in Lincoln and the Swanson Foundation in Omaha.
The rest of the project was paid for with college funds, Trebbien said. The school started saving money a decade ago after an outside consultant advised that a new culinary institute should anchor the school's Fort Omaha campus.
Today, that advice is reality: The new institute sits at the campus's new front door, an entrance on Sorensen Parkway just west of 30th Street.
Metro leaders and instructors stress that the building's bells and whistles aren't simply for show. Rather, they expect the new institute to elevate Metro's already renowned two-year culinary degrees.
The institute's enrollment has tripled to 600 students in the past decade, growth spurred in part by the popularity of reality TV cooking contests.
The new building has already yielded an even bigger crop of students: Initial enrollment for the winter quarter is up 22 percent over last winter, Trebbien said.
The institute's current students are definitely juiced. As Trebbien led his tour, a group of students and instructors were moving in the building's first shipment of food.
Most of the students had simply shown up and were volunteering to help, Trebbien said.
Another sign of excitement: One student after another stopped Trebbien during his tour.
They wanted to compliment him on the new building and say thanks.
“I have to tell you,” said one student, Brian Sullivan. “This place is delicious.”
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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