If you step into the kitchens at many of Central Iowa’s fine dining establishments, you’ll likely find a Des Moines Area Community College graduate cooking up the evening’s featured entrees.

The college’s culinary arts program has a 31-year history of turning out some of the area’s top chefs. Now, following a $2 million renovation, the newly renamed Iowa Culinary Institute is in place to make sure the program is a cut above the rest, not only in Iowa, but worldwide.

“We went to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris last year, and our teaching kitchen, with all the high-tech screens and remote mikes and overhead video, is nicer than what the Cordon Bleu has, and the Cordon Bleu is considered the gold standard,” DMACC President Rob Denson said. “We’ve just really got a great program.”

Robert Anderson, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who founded the college’s culinary arts program in 1975, said the renovation project and branding efforts bring the program a certain amount of prestige and respect and an ability to take it to the next level. He calls the ICI the “pièce de résistance.”

Through the construction project, DMACC doubled the size of its teaching kitchen and added cameras that project the lesson onto several flat-screen televisions, which enables better viewing by students. The college also remodeled its dining room and expanded its test kitchen.

And it will need the extra space. Anderson said the ICI has doubled in size to now serve 150 students. The college has added faculty as well, with six full-time teachers and 10 adjunct instructors.

The ICI was created in a way that ensures that each student learns the ins and outs of the entire restaurant business, not just the workings of the kitchen. Students rotate through several positions in the college’s bistro, which is open weekdays for lunch, preparing food, taking orders and serving tables.

Partnerships with Grand View College and Iowa State University also provide ICI students with an opportunity to expand their knowledge beyond the kitchen and prepare them for restaurant management positions. About a half-dozen ICI students are currently taking classes through Grand View, and Anderson expects it to take off in the future.

“If a student says, ‘I want to be a chef,’ they’re still required to go out and serve tables, take orders, work the front of the house,” said Jim Stick, DMACC’s academic dean. “So you may be a chef, but you’re going to have experience doing all the things, from the front of the house to the back of the house, organizing, managing, buying products. It becomes a comprehensive program. So students get an introduction to all the facets of the food service industry.”

“I always tell them it gives them another key to put on their key ring to open up another door,” Anderson said. “It’s an old cliché, but it really means a lot about how they can move around in this world.”

ICI students have access to a number of hands-on learning experiences within the school as well, including the 25 to 30 gourmet dinners DMACC hosts throughout the year, each of which draws 80 to 100 guests for a seven-course meal.

The culinary arts program is also in the 21st year its French Chef Exchange program, the longest-running program of its kind in the United States. Renowned French chefs spend two weeks at DMACC each January to instruct the students in French cuisine, and ICI students travel to France in May, serving as their apprentices for several weeks. The college is now considering adding an Italian chef exchange program as well, Denson said.

DMACC, moving in step with statewide growth in the wine industry, has entered into a consortium with Kirkwood Community College, Northeast Iowa Community College and Indian Hills Community College, the Regional Midwest Wine Consortium. Denson said it will serve as “workforce training for a big, developing market.” The colleges are preparing to hire a full-time enologist to teach courses about wines and conduct workshops for students and the general public.

In addition, DMACC will likely build a wine processing facility that can perform operations such as bottling and labeling for small Iowa wine producers. Kirkwood plans to develop a vineyard, and DMACC is considering doing the same.

“Our main thrust with the culinary institute is to produce quality chefs,” Denson said. “All this is a part of it.”