A tiny teaching kitchen with a very large culinary range

Pickwick & Cherry produces more than 300 public and private experiences each year. Our calendar includes date-night dinners, baking workshops, cooking lunches, musical-gastronomy programs, youth intensives, guided tastings, private and corporate events, off-site programs, demonstrations, and collaborative performances.

One week may involve French pastry, Colombian cooking and live violin, a Georgian supra, a room full of young bakers, a private pasta workshop, and an extremely detailed conversation about vanilla. This is normal here.

Since reopening for in-person programming in 2021, we have completed more than 880 events and now welcome more than 3,000 students annually. The room is small. The work is not.

It started with bread

Pickwick & Cherry began in 2010 as a small-batch bakery, selling bread and cookies through local stores, CSAs, farmers markets, and any arrangement that allowed founder Katie Kring to keep baking.

The name and format changed more than once. The central idea did not: make unusually good things (and/or good unusual things) and put them in people’s hands.

Someone asked about a class

In 2014, a reporter called to ask whether Katie offered bread-baking classes.

She did not.

She said yes anyway.

The class revealed that people did not merely want to buy bread. They wanted to touch the dough, ask questions, make mistakes, and understand how it worked. And she wanted to teach them everything she knew. 

Food is an excellent way into a larger story

Pickwick & Cherry ideas come from everywhere: travel, books, research, music, history, languages, ingredients, producers, collaborators, family recipes, casual conversations, and questions that should have had simple answers but did not.

We research seriously, but rarely in a straight line. We may begin by trying to buy Japanese sesame seeds and end up, through an entirely reasonable series of events, with a folder full of ideas for Austrian pumpkins, some ongoing questions about the culinary merits of puffins, or an exciting new use for our favorite South African vinegar. 

A conversation about a cheese leads to a regional bread, which leads to an old festival, which leads to a song, which leads to an entirely new evening at Pickwick & Cherry.

Travel matters, but so do the people we meet, the things they make, and the details they are excited enough to explain. We taste, read, listen, ask questions, test recipes, follow unexpected connections, and figure out how to turn what we find into something our guests can understand, make, eat, and remember.

We go deep. We go hard. Sometimes we go weird. Usually, in fact. 

Serious food. Fun people.

Our classes are genuinely hands-on. Guests knead, chop, shape, season, taste, adjust, ask questions, and learn what to look for when a recipe inevitably behaves differently at home. We care about technique because useful knowledge lasts longer than a perfect photograph, and about context because food comes from people, places, histories, agriculture, migration, celebration, necessity, and invention.

And occasionally, Pickwick & Cherry becomes a real bakery again. Seasonal production and special projects turn the teaching kitchen back into a working bakehouse, producing breads, pastries, confections, and gifts in serious quantities. The skills we teach are also skills we use professionally, repeatedly, under deadline, and at scale.

Our instructors are serious food people: working bakers, cooks, culinary teachers, and ingredient obsessives with years of practical experience. We are also composers, singers, instrumentalists, theatre writers, storytellers, and lifelong theatre kids. We know how to make the food work and how to keep a room with us while it does.

Pickwick & Cherry classes are also fun. And funny. Not “one whimsical sentence written by a marketing department” funny. Actually funny. Classes often contain irreverent stories, surprising digressions, strong opinions about trivial matters (look… it’s better for everyone if you just don’t rub your doughy hands together to clean them and make a pile of dough-worms on Katie’s table), obscure facts, occasional singing and chanting, unsolemn oaths sworn on piping bags, and threats of vigorous whisking to keep everyone in line. If something goes wrong, we will fix it, explain it, and almost certainly make fun of it. You will learn a great deal, but in the end, we’re all here to have a good time and eat an irresponsible amount of éclairs.