I’m the founder and CEO of the League of Kitchens, which is a culturally immersive cooking school in New York City and online. All of our instructors are immigrant women who are exceptional home cooks, teaching their family recipes and hosting workshops in their homes around New York City (and, from their homes, online). This year is our tenth anniversary, so we’ve been in business since 2014. 

The idea for League of Kitchens came out of my own experience in that my mother is a Korean immigrant — she immigrated to the US in the early 1970s — and my father is of Hungarian-Jewish descent; he’s basically a Jewish New Yorker. My Korean grandmother lived with my family when I was growing up; she would cook amazing Korean food all the time, and I always wanted to cook with her. But she would always say, “Oh, go study. It’s more important.” She didn’t really value her own cooking skills. Her family and culture expected it and took it for granted; she really wanted me to have professional and educational opportunities that she didn’t have. So, I never learned to cook from her, and neither did my mother.

Fast forward, I was living in Manhattan with my boyfriend, now husband, in 2004, cooking for myself for the first time and wanting to cook Korean recipes that I grew up eating. My grandmother had passed away by that time, so I tried to teach myself from cookbooks and the Internet. Nothing tasted as good as when she made it. I realized that there are often little nuances and tips and tricks that are often left out of cookbooks that you really need to learn from a person. They’re often sensory-based: “When it sounds like this, do this,” or “When it tastes like this, do this.” I had this fantasy of another Korean grandmother who I could cook with and learn from.

I did an MFA in Boston focusing on socially engaged art, social practice and participatory public art, during which I did a lot of projects involving food. I moved back to New York, and that idea from my early twenties came back to me, “What if I could find amazing home cooks from around the world living in New York City who could host cooking classes in their homes?” It would be just as much an opportunity for cross-cultural exchange as culinary learning and eating.

I initially thought I’d do this as a three-month public art project, but I decided to do it as a small pilot to see if it could work. I found two women who are actually still teaching with me, and the pilot was super successful. I realized it took a huge amount of effort to find and train the right people, and it seemed like a waste to do this for a three-month project, so I decided to do it as a small business — a recreational, unconventional cooking school.

How do you find these incredible women to teach the classes?

The success of our workshops is dependent on us finding these amazing people who are not only exceptional home cooks who make everything from scratch but also are warm, engaging, comfortable hosting strangers in their homes and comfortable sharing their stories. Over the last eleven years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people and done close to 75 in-home cooking auditions. We’ve connected with a number of our instructors through a partnership with the International Rescue Committee. That’s how we met our Afghan and Nepali instructors. We met a couple through the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, which has this small catering collective. The rest came from word of mouth, media postings, moms of friends of friends. Our most recent hire is from Burkina Faso in West Africa. I met someone at a party who was from Burkina Faso; I asked her if she knew an amazing home cook, and she connected us. I feel like some things about finding the right people are magical and synchronistic. When I find them, I just know.

This might be an impossible question, but is there a particular story or instructor you’d like to highlight?

Our instructors come from a wide range of backgrounds and have a wide range of immigration stories. Our Greek instructor came here in the early 1970s as a nurse. Our Afghan instructor came almost thirteen years ago as a refugee. Our Iranian instructor, Mab, came as a political refugee – she was a well-known women’s, democracy and gay rights activist who had been in prison several times in Iran. Her experience is not what people think of when they think of Iran.

So often, places that the US has been in conflict with feel abstract and distant. Coming into, for example, our Afghan instructor’s home makes our students feel more connected. When people read about Afghanistan after leaving Nawida’s home, they think, “That person could be Nawida’s brother or cousin or aunt or uncle.” Parts of the world that feel remote or abstract start to feel more personal and real.

Our Uzbek instructor was a cardiologist in Uzbekistan. She won a green card, and she and her husband came to New York. She loves teaching, and cooking and hosting, so this was her dream job. 

Our Ukrainian-Russian instructor, Larisa, just turned ninety! Her daughter is the famous food writer Anya Von Bremzen, who wrote “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” which is mostly about Larisa. It’s amazing to hear her talk about living in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the bombings of Moscow during World War II and leaving the Soviet Union in the late ‘70s thinking that she would never see her friends or family again.

Ten years is a pretty big milestone. How has League of Kitchens changed, particularly during and after Covid?

When Covid hit, we had to cancel six weeks of sold-out classes. What we do is, so intentionally, not socially distanced. We’re purposefully bringing groups of strangers together in small interior spaces to talk and eat together. Very early, I realized that we would have to have some kind of online offering if we wanted to survive the pandemic. I took classes at about six online cooking schools to understand what it looked like. I figured out what I liked about these places, what we could do differently and designed this whole new online class business. 

We had to then train these older immigrant women how to use all of this technology remotely. They did amazing, and we launched our first online classes. They are very participatory and intimate; the instructor leads you through making several recipes step by step. When I did one of our first online classes as a student, I was actually blown away by how fun and connected it was. Our in-person classes are amazing in terms of emotional connection, bonding, the excitement of being in someone’s home and eating food that they’ve made for the welcome meal, but you cook like a family. One student is chopping the onions, one is grating the carrots, one is stirring the soup. But in our online courses, each student is doing every step themselves, start to finish, in their own kitchen.

It was a very happy surprise to find out that these were wonderful in a different way. People from all over the country started doing them. It started off as mostly our former students, who were mostly New Yorkers, who would invite their family members who lived elsewhere to join. We continued with the online classes even after we restarted our in-person classes in the Fall of 2021. Now, our online classes are pretty much all people who live outside of New York. They might not be able to get that kind of food where they live. We have a lot of students in the Midwest, the South, a lot of places where you can’t get, for example, Uzbek food.

Now, we’re rebuilding our in-person classes and events – we do large cooking classes for companies and organizations in a beautiful loft space in Chinatown. It’s taken a long time for us to rebuild this format because it’s taking people a while to get back into these intimate experiences with people they don’t know. I think, in a way, there’s more of a need for it, but there’s still some hesitation. 

This is a concept that works so well in New York City – do you think that it could be used elsewhere?

I think we will always have our headquarters in New York City. In terms of opening in other cities, we’re always getting emails from people saying, “Come to my city!” and I’m open to it. We actually did a satellite in Los Angeles for about a year in 2018. It was more challenging than I expected. We were trying to see if we wanted to set up a second location there. What I found is that it was harder to find instructors than I expected. LA is also super diverse and immigrant-heavy. In New York City, the immigrants are all pushed up against each other in the subway or in the street. Maybe there’s more of a comfort in having people from other cultures in your home, whereas, in LA, the immigrant groups are split up into more independent enclaves. It seemed like a harder sell to get people to feel comfortable doing this.

In New York, everyone lives in small apartments, and on the weekends, they’re like, “What are we doing? Where are we going?” It’s not a big deal to go on the train for 45 minutes to Kew Gardens or Borough Park. In LA, people drive so much during the week that on the weekends, they want to just stay in their own neighborhood, so it’s hard to get people to drive to other parts of the city for classes. It was an interesting thing because I thought it would be just like New York, and it wasn’t. 

Maybe one day, we’ll have enough scale and interest to make it work in another place. I’m definitely open, but I’m not in a rush to do it unless there’s a wave of support and enthusiasm. 

What’s next for League of Kitchens?

We have our first cookbook coming out on Nov. 12. I hope that we get to do more cookbooks because we were writing it in a very detailed manner to capture all of the nuances that make our instructors such great cooks. We’re also presenting a lot of cultural context and information. How do you eat this food? What do you eat it with? 

Our Afghan instructor has this amazing red kidney bean dish that’s cooked with Basmati rice, whole cloves of garlic and whole clove spices. It’s always served with slices of red onions with lemon juice, mint and chili powder. You haven’t really experienced the beans if you don’t eat them with those raw onions. Because of the need for details like that, we had to cut, like, sixty recipes from our cookbook. So, I’m hopeful that we’ll have many cookbooks in the future.

I would love to do a TV show. I think that our instructors are so charismatic and dynamic, so that would work well. We’re always looking for new instructors. The cuisines we offer are based on the individuals we find. For instance, we offer Argentinian cooking, which is not something I had in mind, but I met our Argentinian instructor, and her food was so incredible. Her home was filled with Argentinian art and cookware, and she’s such an amazing host that I said, “I have to hire her!” There are a ton of cuisines we don’t offer — I’d love to find a Chinese instructor, a Korean instructor, a Brazilian instructor. There are so many.

I love that we started the interview talking about the shortcomings of cookbooks, and we’re ending it talking about the way a cookbook should be. I feel this on a deep level. I have a real issue with optional garnishes because including them or not makes a completely different dish.

Exactly! 

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

We’ve also just launched a really awesome line of merch. We have two slogans, “Cook with love,” which our instructors always say whenever you ask them what the secret ingredient is, and “Cook like a grandma.” Cooking like a grandma is a state of mind. You don’t have to be a literal grandma — cooking with love, intention, attention and connecting to tradition and heritage, making delicious everyday food: that’s cooking like a grandma.