9' x 12': Chapter 2 - Pivot 101

One kitchen down. One to go. We had settled into the new house and now economic reality set in. Moving is an expensive business. The balance on my credit cards proof of the drain of the past few months. To redress the balance of my leaking ship I needed to find a teaching kitchen as soon as possible and get back to work.

Our town, for all its restaurants and event locations has a paucity of teaching kitchens available. Years ago, I had looked at opening a full scale, seven days a week cooking school much in the vein of the excellent Gourmandise School in Santa Monica, however the logistics of the project, the cost of renting a suitable kitchen in Santa Barbara and the fact that the city has a tiny population compared to the metropolis that is Los Angeles quickly put paid to that plan. The numbers just didn’t pencil out. My school was small. I taught a few classes a week and ideally needed to find a space that I could rent for a few hours or half a day at a time. The key was the availability and the layout. Restaurants kitchen are designed for efficient food production, which doesn’t necessarily translate to a good teaching space which needs to be more open plan. I also needed a space where we could sit and eat the meal prepared as all my cooking classes were, and still are, structured around a three-course meal.

Pascale’s Kitchen came about in a rather haphazard and circuitous manner. Long dreamt of and styled on a Chez Panissesque Bistro, I started teaching classes because I realized, sadly, that I would never open a restaurant. I have no professional food training. I went to business school and worked in the property development business, yet always toyed with the idea of doing something with food, my longtime passion.

My grandmother, Genevieve Fay, in her kitchen, a twinkle always in her eyes.

I was taught to cook by my mum and grandmother. Mostly Provencal cooking, with the some Indian dishes thrown in with mum, with whom I learnt to make, amongst other things Tarte a l’onion, dahls, curries, lentil soups, garlic studded legs of lamb, roast chickens and apple crumble; classic French cuisine with my grandmother whose family came from Normandy, full of crème fraiche and good butter with dishes like Poulet a l’estragon, Lapin a la moutarde, gratins, braises, béchamel and other classic sauces. We are a large family with generations of passionate cooks often discussing plans for dinner while making lunch. Even our picnics were elaborate. There were always a lot of people around the table be it in a field or a dining room. Meals for twelve-sixteen-twenty people didn’t faze us as everyone pitched in. I cooked my way through summer holidays in my teenage years, one summer supplying local restaurants with cakes making enough to pay for jaunt to Venice, and for friends in college, all of us crammed in the small kitchen of my freezing flat, books piled on chairs, tumbling aside as we ate rib sticking food and studied for exams. It was good, hearty, home cooked food, without too much refinement.

My father, a bon vivant and a man with a passion for the finer things in life introduced my brother and I to the delights of fine dining at a very young age, his well-thumbed Guide Michelin in hand as he took us along on his gastronomic tours of France. Those were heady times, and we were so, so fortunate to experience the finest of French gastronomy. This multipronged approach to my culinary education sparked a lifelong interest in making interesting, flavor filled food and cooking for others. I loved the conviviality that gathering people around a table brought about and longed to be part of that world, somehow. I imagined, even dreamt of unusual creations that would stupefy my guests. Ha! I soon realized just how much I had to learn.