We’ll Remember Always Graduation Night

You’re graduating from cooking school, and instead of having a prom you get to cook dinner for your friends at the famous Sunset Strip restaurant La Toque. So what do you cook? Last Sunday the eight-student graduating class of the Westlake Culinary Institute produced a seven-course meal of their own devising, starting out from from apple soup, proceeding through tiger-striped ravioli stuffed with shrimp, a Muscovy duck salad and clam with caviar sauce, eventually reaching a New York steak with four peppercorns and three vegetables, a hazelnut terrine, lemon and anise palmiers and poached pears in caramel sauce. The whole thing followed a flight of hors d’oeuvres--duck sausage in puff pastry with apricot dipping sauce; checkerboard canapes of goat cheese tapenade and endive leaves filled with golden caviar. Above, instructor Cecilia DeCastro talks with student Lisa Bianco (right).