scuola di cucina

My school, The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy is a small, hands-on held in the historic centre of Lecce. You can read more- and even hear me speak a little English in a video- by visiting my school’s site www.AwaitingTable.com

We run our courses all year ’round, closing them for the summers (although on occasion we offer day-courses for those already in the region). In the summer of 2010, I’ll be available for day classes as I’m writing a book and will be working on rewrites all summer.

Our programmes are different.  And not just in location (the fact that we’re not in touristy parts of Italy,  or that we’re in the historical centre, rather than your classic Tuscan model- a bunch of foreigners isolated off in a villa, however pretty.) I studied the model for a cooking school and recreated it from scratch: how much you cook as a student, how much we interact at the table, how much our school interacts with the community, etc.

Aside from our normal course that features the food, wine and culture of the Salento (check us in Food and Wine’s article on The Best Cooking Schools in Italy, and in May 2010′s Bon Appetit), we also offer two courses that are very, very close to my heart. It’s personally taken me years to create them, so massive their undertaking. But like I said, these issues are very personal to me, and they will become so for you as well.

Our third programme, which debuts in October of 2010 is The New Wine school of Southern Italy, an interdisciplinary programme designed to promote the autoctonas grapes of Southern Italy, at a time when foreigners are still unfamiliar with them, yet local producers are ripping them out to plant foreign grapes, believing that that is what the foreign market desires. Here is your chance to play a part in saving grape diversity from yet more anonymous Cabernet and chardonnay, while learning more about a fascinating part of the world, quite literally, grapevines in the middle of the Mediterranean.

My personal commitment to the wine programme is noteworthy, as for the last five years I’ve closed the school for a month each year to travel the south of Italy by bicycle for a month, researching the stunning diversity in autoctonos vines that produce wines like no where else on earth. I’ve also spent the last three years training as a sommelier in the Italian national system.