Top Cooking and Culinary Schools

The Art Institutes

Le Cordon Bleu Schools

The French Culinary Institute

Italian Culinary Academy

Fast Food Chefs

Probably the last place you want to work after graduating from cooking school is a fast food restaurant. In fact, working at one might signal the abject failure of your culinary studies -- you don't need to go to cooking school to flip burgers at Burger King.

But what about deciding what food is served, and creating the successful food concepts that thousands of workers will learn to prepare, and millions will consume? That might be another story.

Enter chefs like Dan Coudreaut, director of culinary innovation at McDonald's. According to this Chicago Tribune article, new fast food items like the recent McDonald's Mac Snack Wrap are born with the help of Coudreaut and his team of chefs. Starting with a concept from marketing, the chefs brainstorm, create, and test new food items to meet the marketing goal and please the customer palette.

Once the new foods pass the focus group test, they are tried out in a few restaurants to see how the kitchens and staff will handle them. After this, the concepts may be market-tested in a variety of regions, and then they make the national scene (and possibly your stomach). The really successful ideas stick around for years.

So, culinary innovation isn't limited to haute cuisine, and it's possible that the next big thing will come not from a major fast-food player, but from your favorite local fast food business with an eye for culinary creativity and the smarts to hire a trained professional.