The gourmet cafe with its blond wood stools, grilled portobello mushroom sandwiches and three-tiered display of hand-wrapped dessert bars seems slightly out of place on Metropolitan Avenue in the gritty Parkchester section of the Bronx.

But Urban Horizons Cafe is hardly an ordinary business. It is the for-profit arm of Urban Horizons Food Co. Opened in January, the eatery is the newest wrinkle in UHFC's innovative experiment to prepare inner-city people to take on skilled jobs. In the process, the group is also helping ease the chronic shortage of trained labor for the city's small food companies and restaurants.

Since its founding four years ago, UHFC-an offshoot of the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corp., a Bronx-based nonprofit-has trained dozens of inner-city residents. The new cafe has two missions: to give people food industry experience, and hopefully to soon generate income.

"UHFC is a business, a high-end catering company and cafe with a highly skilled professional staff," says Nancy Biberman, president and co-founder of WHEDCO. "Because of the training aspect, our internal costs are higher. But our prices have to be competitive."

As a result, the cafe is running at a loss. Half of its operating funds flow from its parent. Ms. Biberman is counting on the cafe to become profitable next year.

Students have their plates full

The cafe's food comes from a 4,000-square-foot kitchen and bakery at WHEDCO's headquarters in the South Bronx. There, 30 students at a time spend half their day in the classroom and the other half on the job, turning out gourmet fare such as wasabi-dusted seared tuna and soybean spanakopita, for a wide variety of clients.

Since the workers are rank beginners, not only in the kitchen but in many cases in the workforce, they are supervised by a nearly equal number of professional chefs-a costly necessity. UHFC director Jill Rose was formerly a pastry chef at Aureole and Lespinasse. She and other teachers were trained at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Because it is a classroom, not an assembly line, UHFC's kitchen is slow. A fair bit of food never makes it out the door. That waste also drives up costs. For a while, UHFC was spending 70% of its budget on ingredients. That figure has been slashed to around 30%, which is close to the industry standard.

"The goal here is to be self-sufficient. We're trending in the right direction, but it needs to happen faster," Ms. Biberman says. Revenues for the first half of the year were $250,000, which is 65% more than UHFC earned during the same period last year. "We have the physical and staff capacity to handle two to three times the amount of orders that we're getting now," she says.

It costs an estimated $18,000 to train a student during the six-month program. Each student pays only $245 in tuition, which includes a knife set, uniforms and textbooks. To make up for that huge gap, UHFC relies on its sales revenue, as well as grants and public funding for job training.

Places at the table

The program has a 97% placement rate for the half of its students who make it all the way through. Graduates start in entry-level jobs paying about $7 per hour. They are employed at top food establishments like Restaurant Associates' eateries, Amy's Bread bakery and Tabla restaurant. Two alums are working in the Parkchester cafe.

In addition to supplying the cafe, UHFC's kitchen has contracts to provide sandwiches and baked goods to clients like the Carlyle Hotel and the cafeterias at Columbia University.

UHFC also has an active catering business. Customers range from Christie's auction house to Polo Ralph Lauren, not to mention an increasing number of people holding backyard barbecues in the Hamptons. "We're very competitive with any of the top-notch catering companies," insists Ms. Rose.

Copyright 2001, Crain Communications, Inc