MOSCOW -- When Moscow's culinary school dropped Marxism-Leninism and dialectical materialism from its three-year course of study, the school could no longer hide the fact that it offered only three months of instruction in actual cooking.
If Communist ideology ruined Russia's economy, it had a truly frightening effect on culinary science.
Restaurants and cafeterias seemed to compete to offer insulting service -- closing for an hour at lunchtime for the staff to eat, or haughtily turning customers away from a cavernous and empty room because they hadn't made reservations.
And the food!
Diners were not entirely surprised to discover that the cooking school relied heavily on plastic models and photographs of real food in its courses. A factory in the formerly secret city of Gorky produced the detailed plastic imitations of meat, potatoes and vegetables that were used to show a student how his work should look.
Now all that is changing. Capitalism has arrived like a very large and bubbly bicarbonate of soda.
The culinary school has named itself Personnel for Public Catering in the Market Economy and has replaced "History of the Communist Party" with a kitchen where real food is prepared.
The exams that asked students how many tractors were produced and what Stalin said to the 15th Party Congress are gone.
The school, which used to accept any student sent there, now is private and takes only those paying tuition. A boom is under way in foreign-operated restau- rants, and the relatively high pay they offer has not gone unnoticed.
Until 1991, it was against the law to tip a waiter. A tip was a bribe. Now, waiters in the classy restaurants can legally pocket handsome tips. The new incentives have produced a growing number of highly motivated would-be chefs, waiters and bartenders.
"Now they pay for the teaching, so they are very interested in everything they can get," said a pleasantly surprised Lyudmilla Asharina, who has been teaching at the culinary school 38 years. They never leave you in peace. They ask a lot of questions."
Mrs. Asharina, who has a wide, towering white cap so crisply starched it looks as if it was borrowed from the Flying Nun, was instructing her students in some of the basic fish dishes of the Russian kitchen.
Out from the ovens came Fish Baked Russian Style, swathed in a rich cream sauce, and Fish Baked Moscow Style, encased in potatoes and cream.
"Now we're starting to teach students traditional Russian food, some of which was forgotten," said Mrs. Asharina, chief instructor at the school. During the Soviet era, food was fuel to be burned in service to the state. To make anything more of it was hopelessly bourgeois.
Gristly meat
While cafeterias produced distasteful vats of gristly meat and other stomach-churning specials, Russians lived hidden food lives at home.
Much as they shouted "Hurrah" to communism in public and ridiculed it at home, so did they eat their fill in workplace cafeterias while braising, chopping, beating and mixing endlessly so that their own kitchens offered flavorful food.
"The Russian soul is very wide," Mrs. Asharina said, "and Russian people are very hospitable. They try to show it with their cooking.
"It doesn't matter whether they're rich or poor, the average person will put everything he has on the table for a guest -- and gladly."
So far, Russian cooking schools, limited by poor finances and isolation, have been following the restaurant boom rather than leading it.
They don't have the money to discover the exotic food the nouveau riche crave.
Oleg V. Glushchenko, director of Moscow's culinary school, hasn't gone out to eat for three years.
His deputy, Nina A. Nikiforova, who is also vice president of the Moscow Culinary Association, hasn't been out to eat for five years. Neither can afford it.
Russian graduates are filling the lower-level cooking positions, while Moscow's trendiest restaurants are run by Americans and Europeans.
Ken Frost, a 35-year-old New Yorker, is executive chef of a hot new restaurant called Azteca.
Mr. Frost -- trained in Providence, R.I. -- serves up chicken in mole sauce, quesadillas and endless Margaritas.
One of his most loyal customers is Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist, extremist politician who publicly loathes America.
"Sometimes you hear complaints in the kitchen about so many foreigners," Mr. Frost said, "but I just tell them it's up to them to work hard enough so they can replace me." John Reilly, a 29-year-old Pennsylvanian, feels like a pioneer on one of the last food frontiers.
Mr. Reilly -- trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. -- runs the kitchen for two swanky rooms at the Teatro Restaurants, a Russian-Dutch joint venture.
$68 oysters
His Lobster Grill sells oysters imported from America for $68 a dozen. A lobster costs $50 or more. Night after night, every table is filled.
Mr. Reilly thinks that he and his colleagues may have a profound effect on Russian cooking, similar to what Europeans did for American food after World War II.
"Two new foreign-backed restaurants are opening every month in Moscow," he said. "If you can tap in, it's instant success."
Moscow's cooking school is trying hard to keep up. It offers courses in waiting table for the most elegant dining rooms.
The head of the bartender program keeps striving for innovation.
"I call this bartender's surprise," said Larissa M. Shkoradova, topping a healthy slug of vodka with an equal dose of kirsch and several ounces of orange soda pop.
Over at the Food Museum, director Nikolai Zavyalev shakes his head sadly at such market economy shenanigans.
"We used to have a five-year plan that kept balance in the national economy," he said. "I'm a supporter of that plan system."
Life was certain then, he said. You knew if you ordered a cutlet in a restaurant you could expect 31 grams of ground meat coated with 15 grams of bread crumbs -- nothing more, nothing less, everything according to plan.
The plan never said it had to taste good.