Plans for a new culinary school get rolling, and some in New Orleans call it a game changer

About a year from now, if all goes according to plan, the first students will walk through the doors of the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute, begin working in the teaching kitchens and classrooms across its five floors and, by the summertime, emerge with a different trajectory for their careers.

NOCHI, as the forthcoming school is called, will mark a new approach for job training and talent development in the hospitality sector, an economic engine for New Orleans that is also one of its cultural cornerstones.

It will also be a fresh start for a connected cluster of buildings on the edge of downtown with a vexing past.

Plans for NOCHI have been years in the making, but now renovation work is finally underway to ready its facility, and an official groundbreaking is slated for Tuesday (Jan 16). The inaugural class is expected to begin in January 2019.

Read more: http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/entertainment_life/food_restaurants/article_8a5a277c-f7eb-11e7-aa5d-03bce984801f.html