For a few years, Tim Lanza led a double life: as a student at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, and a cook at Marigold Kitchen, West Philadelphia's laboratory of modernist cooking. By the time he'd worked his way up from garde-manger to sous chef, school felt redundant.

"I was learning so much at Marigold: molecular gastronomy, gels and foams," he said. "Then, I'd be sitting in a class where we're learning how to make omelets correctly."

So, he dropped out.

Then, he got a real education. Last year, at 26, he and chef Andrew Kochan purchased Marigold.

"Doing it on our own has been a crazy learning experience," he said. "Did going to culinary school help prepare for it? I'd say, not really."

It's a common sentiment among many of the chefs electrifying Philadelphia's restaurant scene - a landscape once dominated by European-trained chefs and alumni of the elite Culinary Institute of America.

It raises a familiar question: Are culinary schools worth the money when there's on-the-job education to be had for free? And, perhaps more important, are they adequately training the talent to fuel the city's restaurant boom?

Chef and restaurateur Marc Vetri, who learned to cook on the job, has his doubts. "I just think culinary school is antiquated," he said. He thinks it's too shallow, too one-size-fits-all for a food culture that demands deep knowledge and expertise. "They're teaching things you can learn working. They have just not evolved with the restaurant world."

Nonetheless, he now teaches a culinary class at Drexel.

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Is culinary school necessary?