Instructor brings international flair to the test kitchens

By Brendan Buhler

Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Heinz Lauer is the executive chef of Las Vegas Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, master of 550 would-be gourmet chefs, whom he guides through subjects such as knife handling and American politics (really). He is dressed in full regalia and is explaining all of this in the college’s tastefully modern lobby, when he is interrupted.

A woman with large earrings that appeared to be made from aluminum foil sampled the free pastries with noisy delight.

“Mmm,” she said. “Are these from here?”

“No, they are from Costco,” Lauer said.

Pause.

“Yes! Of course we bake them!” Lauer said, laughing like a Vespa leaving a stoplight.

Then he went back to promoting the college’s student-run restaurant, the best-kept secret in town, he said, open for an hour and a half each at lunch and dinner, Tuesdays through Fridays.

“Where else can you get a New York steak like this for $15?”

Or for that matter, a duck confit for $10?

Wait. There’s an American politics class in this seminary of French cuisine?

Yes. There’s a state law — unique to Nevada, as far as Lauer knows — that requires the college to teach American politics. Le Cordon Bleu satisfies the law by teaching the Constitution and health and fire regulations, “which, in essence, are all politics.”

That aside, students learn to butcher, control costs, plan meals and about the difference between cooking and baking. (The former is an art, the latter an unforgiving science.)

Lauer started learning his trade when he was 14 years old and left his home in Duesseldorf for an apprenticeship. He had spent much of his life in and out of the kitchens of his parents’ three restaurants. Continuing the family trade, however, was not what his parents had in mind for Lauer.

“Momma didn’t want me to become a cook. They already had the restaurants,” Lauer said. “Momma wanted to see me in a suit and tie, in a bank.”

Instead, he trained in French cuisine, cooked at restaurants around Germany and, in 1988, stepped onto a cruise ship.

“I took one job for six months and nine years later I stepped off the boat,” Lauer said.

When he stepped off, he was married and living in Santa Rosa, Calif. He took a job teaching at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. After working 13 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week, it was nice to have weekends off.

Unfortunately, it came with a three hour commute. So he moved to Las Vegas and went back to the working kitchen. But when Le Cordon Bleu decided to open a Las Vegas campus in a Summerlin business park, it hired Lauer. In the 5 1/2 years it has been open, it has graduated more than 1,700 students, three-quarters of whom came to the school from outside of Nevada. Now they work up and down the Strip, in London, in Paris and in Seoul.

All of those students, all of those training kitchens and bakeries — what happens to all of the food?

The students eat what they cook, Lauer said.

“They are always hungry.”