By Richard Foss, Cuisine and Restaurant Writer
The dining public rarely sees chefs at the everyday practice of their trade. There are occasional exceptions, such as restaurants with open kitchens, but even there the view is usually of the backs of working employees. Many chefs like it that way because they can focus on cooking without interruptions. Christine Brown, who owned the famed Restaurant Christine, was different. Restaurant Christine brought adventurous dining to Palos Verdes.
“At my restaurant, I used to have a station right by the dining room where I could chop and cook and still talk to customers,” Brown said. “I wasn’t teaching them about techniques, but it did give me a chance to interact with them one-on-one and answer questions.”
The gregarious chef gained confidence in her teaching skills over the course of wine dinners and culinary events at her restaurant. She was recently front and center at a cooking class for the Chefs Studio series in San Pedro. Brown sees these classes as a chance to educate a segment of the population that has lost the skills of preparing food, or possibly never learned them, and that are now discovering that something is missing in their lives.
“Up until about six years ago, a lot of people were just dining out, getting take-out orders, or buying prepared food,” Brown said. “There has been a whole resurgence of people wanting to learn to cook, whether for community with friends or as a familial thing. Those who have learned to appreciate food in restaurants want to nourish themselves now and they want to do it well at home.”
Family dinners and dinner parties used to be common events for everyone, but the default now is to invite people out to dinner, not invite them to enjoy something we make, or to ask them to contribute. Asked how to encourage such a return, Brown said that she takes an active role.
“You have to initiate it, because people don’t take the time,” Brown said. “They’re too busy to have dinner parties once a week, because everyone’s working. There’s no time, the way there was when you had one person in the family staying at home. We have a group of friends that gets together once a month. There are six couples and we do six courses, and everybody brings a bottle of wine to suit one course.”
Before you do something like that, of course, you have to be confident in your own skills at cooking. That’s where the classes come in. The Chefs Studio series is presented in an art deco space on Pacific Avenue that was once a Montgomery Ward department store. The concept came from a chance meeting at a concert in the building’s basement theater. A chef named Mario Martinoli attended an event there, and after the show he started chatting with Patti Kraakevik, who co-owns the building. Martinoli didn’t know it, but there was a beautiful and lavishly equipped kitchen upstairs, which opens to a living room big enough to easily seat 50 people with a good view. As Kraakevik tells it, Martinoli also didn’t know he was talking to someone with a passion for the culinary arts.
“I had wanted to do this for a long time but didn’t know how to go about it,” Kraakevik said. “I showed him our kitchen, he thought it would work, and that’s how it got started.”
Kraakevik is different from Brown and Martinoli in that not only had she never run a restaurant, she hadn’t learned to cook when she was young.
“My mother wasn’t a great cook when I was growing up, but in her later years she decided to buy cookbooks and wanted to learn how to cook,” said Kraakevik. “Her health didn’t allow it, but she would look at the books… After she passed away, I had more cooking equipment and cookbooks than you could imagine. I just decided, ‘Why not use them?’”
Kraakevik developed a passion for cooking. She will be co-leading a class with collaborator Rexx Lipman later this year. She shares Brown’s assessment of the importance of social entertaining and retold a story of a recent encounter with people who are ignorant of the culinary arts.
“I had tenants at one of my properties who lived there for three years,” said Kraakevik. “After they moved out, I looked and there was dust in the oven. They ate fast food every day, and I can’t imagine that. They are not the only example…. There are a lot of people out there who might want to learn how to cook but don’t know where to start. Rexx and I have thought about doing a class about boiling water — what can you do with boiling water? All kinds of things!”
Kraakevik’s enthusiasm for running this program and teaching was so evident that it seemed natural to ask if she’s planning a career change. Her answer was negative, though there was a slight hesitation before she spoke.
“I’m not ready to retire; I like what I do,” Kraakevik said. “Still, after up to 70 hours a week doing real estate appraisals, I need a creative outlet.”
Cost: $65
Details: (310) 387-3460; info@chefsstudio101.com