The high school students trickle into the instructional kitchen, dragging sneaker-clad feet and slouching slightly in baggy jeans.
Minutes later, they are the picture of professionalism: hands scrubbed, clothes concealed under white uniforms, spiky hairdos tucked inside floppy chef hats.
The mission of the day: to serve a three-course lunch to two dozen businessmen and women. It's a routine task for students of Anne Arundel County's culinary and baking programs at the Center of Applied Technology-North, which have won state and national education honors.
Culinary instructor Bruce Davis darts around the kitchen that his students keep spotless, peering over their shoulders as they assemble plates of salad, pound raw chicken breasts and fire up professional-grade ranges.
"Turn your pans down," Davis tells a group of boys heating clarified butter in cast-iron frying pans, his easy smile fading into seriousness. "Come on! Smoke means it's too hot!"
In the past decade, Davis and baking instructor Peter Akerboom have transformed a training ground for food service workers into a launching pad for world-class chefs and bakers.
The culinary and baking and pastry programs are among the most popular classes at the vocational center in Severn, one of two that serve Anne Arundel County's high schools. Students leave their "home school" for several periods each day and hop on a bus to "vo-tech" - their nickname for the center.
Last year, the programs were named "promising" by a U.S. Department of Education-funded consortium of universities that seeks to advance vocational education - a distinction given to eight schools nationwide. They also received an award of excellence from the Maryland Department of Education, and a governor's citation as the state's most outstanding secondary career and technology educational program.
For the instructors, a bigger reward is the frequent visits from former students who are doing well. Nearly all their students end up working in the food industry. At least a third go on to post-secondary education, some at elite institutions such as the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and Johnson & Wales University.
Arundel High School senior Tabitha Williams, a baking and pastry student, says her friends are impressed when she tells them about her plans to study culinary arts in college and eventually own a restaurant.
"A lot of my friends are like, 'Maybe I want to be a teacher,' or 'Maybe I want to be a psychiatrist,'" Williams says. "But I already know what I want to do."
Williams says she was an "average" student before the program gave her direction. "I wasn't popular," she says. "I wasn't an athletic person. I wasn't a dramatic person."
But after Akerboom singled her out and told her she had a knack for decorating cakes, "I had something I could really show off," she says. In April, she won first place in Maryland in cake decorating at Skills USA, a nationally sponsored competition for vocational students.
As role models, Davis and Akerboom are by no means two slices of the same pie. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America at the precocious age of 19, Davis became an executive chef for Marriott hotels and later managed and designed restaurants for several chains, including the Olive Garden and Clyde's.
"I basically did it all," says Davis, 50. "I was executive chef. I was a general manager. I opened multi-unit restaurants, and I owned my own operation. What else was there for me to do but show somebody else how to do all of this?"
Akerboom learned to bake at a young age from his Dutch grandfather. As a young man in the Marine Corps, he doubled as a baker, making chocolate chip cookies for fellow Marines from a recipe he still uses. Later, he worked the Las Vegas hotel circuit, surviving a 1980 fire at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino that killed 87 people.
At 6 foot 2 and possessing a drill sergeant's voice, Akerboom cuts an imposing figure. He is demanding, he says, because he wants his students to be ready for a job in the real world. "Before they go out with that stamp of approval on their forehead from me, they're going to know what they're doing," he says.
Perhaps because of their different backgrounds, the two men are friendly rivals in their shared kitchen. "We fight like brothers, but then again, we come together when it's time to produce," Akerboom says.
He and Davis work hard to give their students an edge. They teach the youngsters not only knife skills and how to make a perfect pie crust, but kitchen management skills, such as how to calculate the unit cost of ingredients.
"They know, 'If I mess this dough up, that's what it's gonna cost me,'" Akerboom says.
By the time they graduate, nearly all students are ServSafe-certified, the industry standard in sanitation training. Those who continue their studies are able to apply their high school work toward several culinary schools that have credit-transfer agreements with the Center of Applied Technology.
Some former students who have gone on to culinary school say they're ahead of their peers.
Kris McKenzie, a line cook at the Gibson Island Country Club, says he breezed through classes at Pennsylvania Culinary Institute because Davis had taught from the same textbook. "I took the tests like they were nothing," the former Chesapeake High School student recalls.
Down the hall from Davis and Akerboom's kitchen, the 24 business people meeting to discuss the vocational center's heating, ventilating and air-conditioning program have finished their spring salads and are waiting for the main course of chicken piccata.
The students buzz furiously around a double row of plates, one dishing out wild rice next to the chicken and another topping steamed broccoli with a just-finished hollandaise sauce. Several others crowd around them, garnishing the dishes with chopped parsley and capers. "You guys have to learn how to have a sense of urgency here," Davis says, coaxing them to work faster.
On the other side of the kitchen, Akerboom bellows orders at his students, who will be serving cheesecake for dessert. A few whirlwind minutes later, the students have served the last meal and are trotting back to the kitchen to sample the food they've made - and clean the kitchen. Davis pats Chris Fowler on the back, and says: "You guys did a good job."
Fowler, an 11th-grader at Northeast High, smiles and replies, "We always do a good job, Mr. Davis."