Saratoga News

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Linda VanderMarliere demonstrates a cooking technique for students in her Chez Linda cooking school.

Feast of experiences led to cooking school

By Suzanne Cristallo

Interviewing Linda VanderMarliere about what led to the opening of Chez Linda, her cooking school in Los Gatos, is like untangling vermicelli: one strand of her life inevitably mixes and tangles with many others, and the result is a feast of experiences.

A calling to the culinary field came for her at an early age. Born in San Diego, VanderMarliere, now 43, informed her mother she needed her own MixMaster at the age of 7. At 9, she made a wedding cake for a friend.

At 18, she was at UCLA studying physics, which led to a job as a radiation therapist. She indulged her passion for things culinary by working as a caterer after hours.

For six months at a time, VanderMarliere endured her profession, allowing herself the reward of a month at the end of each half year for trips abroad to eat her way through the great restaurants of Europe.

Eventually she recognized her calling. Ignoring the 1970s convention that said women did not belong in kitchens outside the home, she approached the head chef of Trumps in Beverly Hills for a job as a pastry chef. A refugee of the medical field himself, he allowed her to start only after a week of working without pay to prove her worth.

Nearly three years later, unable to speak French and without any job prospects, she moved to Paris and met the chef of Au Trou Gason restaurant, who gave her a job as an assistant.

Over the next 15 years, VanderMarliere served as the personal chef of two Australian ambassadors who disliked French food and desired California cuisine; worked and took classes at a winery in Strasbourg; came to San Francisco to work for the Hilton Corp.; returned to Frankfurt, Germany, to open a $5.5 million restaurant; and moved to Los Gatos to establish her cooking school in 1995.

The Los Gatos connection came through a man she met in Frankfurt who was representing a medical sales group. They plan to be married this fall.

Meanwhile, there is something new in the curriculum at Chez Linda. VanderMarliere calls it "spa cuisine," low-fat fare in the Mediterranean/California style. The two-hour class for pupils who are too busy to attend lengthy sessions stresses healthful food, elegantly served.

Chez Linda Cooking, 469 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos.