Something remarkable is happening at George Brown College’s chef school. I don’t mean the traffic-choking construction as the Adelaide Street East building is remodelled or the brand new student restaurant, called the Chefs’ House, a block south on King. These are just physical manifestations of the profound change that has overtaken the place. The school has shaken off its reputation as a lumbering dino­saur, emerging as a much more nimble and capable creature. The hospitality industry is pouring money and goodwill into its programs. Student interest has never been higher (this year, 6,500 applicants competed for 1,500 available spots). The curriculum has been modernized and new partnerships formed with schools in India and Panama. This metamorphosis comes courtesy of two men: chef John Higgins (director of the George Brown Chef School) and John Walker (dean of the college’s Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts).

The Chefs’ House, set to open in early October, is certainly a beauty. No one who remembers the building’s previous incarnation as Pasquale Bros.’ food store, with its Dickensian storerooms and wobbly floors, would recognize the place. GBC moved in, restoring the turrets on the old paint factory’s roof, turning the upper storeys into classrooms and creating the $2‑million restaurant. Passersby can watch giant TV screens showing the brigades of youthful cooks at work in the gleaming, stainless steel open kitchens, and customers can sit at the long, white bar with its glamorous backlit panels, and watch them in the flesh. In the summer, they can make use of the sidewalk patio tables or rent the 16-seat private room downstairs.

It’s a far cry from Siegfried’s, the fussily formal student restaurant in George Brown’s Adelaide Street property that vanished last winter during the dramatic renovation. In many ways, the comparison symbolizes the revolution that Higgins and Walker have set in motion at the college over the past six years, reinvigorating a program that was at worst moribund or at best stultified by benign neglect. Where Siegfried’s felt desperately old-fashioned, the Chefs’ House is sleek and contemporary. It’s not quite on the cutting edge in terms of technology—no induction ranges among Garland’s gas-fired equipment—but that’s because the students will be heading out into an industry that still runs on gas. “We have to be real,” says Higgins emphatically. “We have to be relevant. We’re training the next generation of chefs, and our graduates have to know what they’ll find when they enter the workforce.” Higgins speaks from experience. In the 1990s, he felt the new GBC graduates coming into his kitchens were totally out of touch. Today the reverse is true, and the change can be traced back quite precisely to the moment in 2002 when Walker finally accomplished a long-held ambition and recruited the renowned hotel chef to head up the faculty. Together they are intent on making GBC the best culinary institute in Canada.

How bad was George Brown? Anne Yarymowich, executive chef at the Art Gallery of Ontario for the past 12 years, took the two-year culinary management course in the early 1980s. “The problem was that most of the teachers hadn’t worked in the industry for decades,” she remembers. “And they didn’t dine out much, so they had no clue what was happening in the industry. There were some dynamic young teachers like Stephen Langley, and several inspiring older chef-instructors, but much of the curriculum was 50 years out of date.” The garde-manger (cold food) course was her bête noire: she had to make a garnish of apple swans to decorate a buffet table and aspic mirrors (once used as presen­tation platters for aspic-covered pâtés and terrines) and sculptures out of lard (Yary­mowich terrified her professor by carving a pagan goddess holding two snakes aloft).