Photos by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Dabney S. Lancaster Community College professor Phil McManus talks with second-year culinary student Martha Obregon, who was in the middle of her beef practical exam. Their new, 3,500-square-foot kitchen at the Rockbridge Regional Center campus is expected to bolster enrollment in the program.

Culinary students Martha Obregon and Kristin Pullen, along with their teacher, Phil McManus, are reflected in a mirror at the school's new 3,500 square-foot kitchen. A stainess steel cap is being custom-made to finish off the top of the wall in the foreground.

Student Kristen Pullen sautes vegetables for her practical exam.

For her practical exam, culinary student Rissa Eakins prepared this chicken-fried steak with mushrooms and asparagus.

BUENA VISTA -- With less than a half-hour to go on her practical exam, culinary student Martha Obregon could not find a vegetable peeler.

She had fearlessly plunged her hand into a huge box of utensils, pushing aside sharp knives and meat forks in search of the one implement she needed for a shaved carrot salad.

No peeler.

Obregon and her fellow students were creating beef dishes in a huge, gleaming new kitchen at Dabney S. Lancaster Community College's satellite campus in Buena Vista. The kitchen is so new, in fact, that the utensils had not been unpacked as of Sept. 16 -- but that earned the students no pity from their professor, Phil McManus.

"If this would have been their first day in a new restaurant kitchen," he said, they'd be expected to find their way.

McManus is all about readying his aspiring chefs for the professional market. That will be much easier now that the school's culinary program is no longer holding lab classes in a concession stand-sized armory kitchen on the main campus in Clifton Forge.

The new, 3,500-square-foot kitchen at the Rockbridge Regional Center campus is expected to bolster enrollment in the program. As a result, it will also boost the number of trained professionals in the market from Lewisburg, W.Va., all the way east to Harrisonburg.

"I think this puts us on the board as having a very credible culinary program, not just some little cooking school," McManus said.

Meet 'Dr. Phil'

Around campus, everyone calls McManus "our Dr. Phil."

When the stocky, mustachioed chef came to Dabney from Idaho State University in 2005, the culinary program had just been upgraded from a certificate to an associate degree. It had come a long way from its roots as a small incubator for The Homestead resort in Bath County, which is located about 25 minutes from Clifton Forge.

"We started it because folks at The Homestead indicated to us that they had a need for trained chefs," said Dabney President Richard Teaff. "We actually started it at The Homestead in their kitchen."

From there, the cooking labs moved to the college's student center grill, which was available only on a limited basis. The National Guard then granted the college permission to use their kitchen, a tiny square in the armory that housed up to 10 students at a time, and that was pushing it.

McManus' schedule was cramped, too -- instead of one five-hour course, for example, he had to teach two. He was responsible for 47 credit hours, seven hours more than what is considered "maximum overload."

At the same time, interest in culinary careers was growing like yeast rolls in a hot oven. Along with the Food Network lineup, shows such as "Top Chef" and "Hell's Kitchen" had more high school graduates dreaming of celebrity chef status -- or at least a decent-paying career behind a stove.

Dabney, the only culinary school convenient to the Alleghany and Rockbridge regions, couldn't grow one bit.

"We knew that was not where we wanted to be for the future," Teaff said.

Students travel for class

Five shiny packages of beef were lined up on the table. Piled across the rest of it were fresh leeks, beets, green peppers, asparagus, heavy cream, eggs and a number of other ingredients.

Five students, who had each drawn two cooking methods from a hat, prepared to select their beef cut and whatever other items they would need to pull off two dishes with sides.

"I'm going to stand here and watch you choose your ingredients so there's no fighting," McManus called out.

With the start time called, the students went about chopping, tenderizing and marinating their meat. Jennifer Mulliken, who chose to make meatballs, got a quick lesson from McManus on how to use the grinder, a huge device that wouldn't have fit well in the old kitchen.

As they prepared for the exam, Obregon, Mulliken and the others were each able to spread out across a 5-foot section of counter space. Collectively, they still took up only about one-fifth of the entire room.

McManus knows, though, that he may someday have three different classes going all at once in that kitchen. The college graduated nine students from the program in May with 100 percent placement. This semester they have about 40 signed up.

Teaff said the college is grateful to Rockbridge County and the cities of Lexington and Buena Vista for their shiny new facility. Those localities partnered to build the $1.5 million, 15,000-square-foot building near Vista Links Golf Course. The land for the Rockbridge Regional Center was donated by Buena Vista.

In addition to the kitchen, which holds some quarter-million dollars in donated equipment from various makers, the building houses classrooms with compressed video for distance learning, a computer lab, a science and nursing lab, office space and a greenhouse, which can be used for botany classes and an herb garden.

All of this will benefit more than just Dabney students, who travel from as far away as West Virginia and Lexington. An agreement with Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave will allow their students to finish general education classes and transfer right into Dabney's culinary program. That means Waynesboro, Staunton, Harrisonburg and the surrounding counties now have an option for their budding chefs, too.

"For our region, it creates another opportunity for folks to get into a rewarding profession," said Blue Ridge President James Perkins.

As an added bonus for foodies, Dabney will also offer occasional non-credit cooking classes at the Rockbridge Regional Center.

A new career

For some students, particularly those who studied cooking in a technical program, Dabney's culinary school is a natural stop after high school graduation. For others, it is a second chance.

Mulliken, 23, and her husband, Brian, of Clifton Forge, left Ferrum College because they could not afford a four-year school. But they do want to educate themselves so they can support their young sons, Adam, 3, and Landon, 1.

"I'm doing a lot for the kids," Mulliken said. "I'm working full time and going to school."

The Buena Vista campus is about a 30-minute drive for Mulliken, but it's still far closer than Virginia Western Community College's program in Roanoke.

Mulliken, who is originally from Northern Virginia, is due to graduate from Dabney in May. She hopes to open her own pastry shop someday.

A fellow student, Peggy May, is starting over after a layoff from Parker Hannifin, a rubber plant in Iron Gate.

"When you are in your 50s, you are almost too old to get hired somewhere, but you are too young to retire, so you still have to find another job or career," said the grandmother of two.

The Virginia Employment Commission offered money for continuing education, so May took it. She had always liked cooking, she said, so that's the route she went.

On that recent Tuesday, May found herself fussing over her pepper steak and sauteeing mushrooms and asparagus in butter.

As she and her peers finished up their Swiss steaks, minute steaks, Hungarian goulash and other dishes, they got another reminder from their teacher: "Remember, hot plates, hot food is what you want in the kitchen. Use your resources, OK?"

One more of those new resources is a refrigerator-sized moist heat proofer, which kept creations such as Mulliken's mini meatloaves warm until judging time.

Two and a half hours after the start of the challenge, four testers sat in the multipurpose lounge outside the kitchen, rubbing their bellies and chatting about the food. McManus would hand the students their grades later. First, they had a half-hour of class time left for cleaning.

Around the pile of dirty dishes they gathered, wielding the jet sprayer and loading the big, commercial-sized dishwasher in their big, commercial-sized kitchen.

They had everything they needed to go from start to finish.

Now, if they could just track down that peeler.