Cooking classes that are more like gatherings of friends

Until she discovered Hipcooks, Janet Thompson had given up on cooking classes because the Santa Ana resident didn’t like the format they offered.

“You go in, you sit, you watch somebody cook something and then they put it together and everyone gets a taste — just a taste,” Thompson said. “You spend a lot of money just to watch someone cook.”

Then she pointed to the commotion at the Hipcooks’ downtown Santa Ana kitchen, where about a dozen people were in the midst of preparing four pasta dishes on a recent Saturday morning.

The scene resembled a friendly dinner gathering, with people laughing and talking around a circular kitchen island while they spooned dollops of butternut squash filling onto squares of pasta and turned sheets of dill-studded dough into fettuccini.

“But here, look at the fun they’re having,” Thompson said. “You get to socialize and entertain and learn and eat. It’s a fabulous way to have a class.”

That’s what owner Monika Reti intended when she started Hipcooks more than a decade ago, right down to the rounded kitchen stations.

“I feel that the best dinner parties are on tables that are circular,” Reti said in a phone interview from Portland, where she is based. “You can have great conversation. That’s kind of what I want Hipcooks to be. I want it to be connective and active, not just with the food and the teacher but with others. Food unites us in such a unique and basic way. It’s something we can all delight in.”

Reti, who has an Argentine father and German mother, credited her love of food to her parents, immigrants who met in the U.S. and befriended other foreigners who would get together to cook and eat.

“It was something that was always natural to me, and I loved it,” she said about cooking. “I was really exposed to food in this lovely way.”

Reti, who earned a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, started cooking for friends and as a way to support herself through college. She also traveled to places such as Venezuela, Morocco and Greece and immersed herself in each area’s food and culture.

In 2000, Reti returned to the U.S. to work as an economist with the RAND Corp. but soon missed being in a kitchen.

“RAND is great but it wasn’t a good fit for me,” she said. “I just bit the bullet. I said, ‘I’m ready to do cooking 100 percent.’”

Reti began thinking about the kind of restaurant she would open but changed her vision in 2003 after a friend at a dinner party asked her to “teach me to cook the way you do.”

That night, Reti threw together an impromptu Moroccan-inspired menu with pantry ingredients and rallied guests to help her in the kitchen, tasting and improvising along the way.

“That was the big lightbulb moment,” Reti said. “That’s when Hipcooks was born.”

Reti started her company as an email list of 15 people before opening her first location at the Brewery in downtown Los Angeles, a space in which she also lived. She carried her groceries on a motorcycle and took out no loans to start the business.

“Hipcooks is really grassroots, so it’s been able to grow organically,” she said. “We don’t advertise. We rely exclusively on word of mouth. Before kids, I would live, eat and sleep Hipcooks, and it was so much fun being in that community.”

Today, Hipcooks has six locations, a cookbook and a newsletter following of about 130,000 people. More than 50 cooking classes are offered, including ones for tapas and Thai cuisine, the most popular classes.

Reti opened Hipcooks in Santa Ana nearly two years ago.

Customers had been asking for an Orange County location so Reti started her search, initially scoping out places at or near Costa Mesa.

Then someone suggested she visit downtown Santa Ana and the Grand Central Art Center, an art-driven complex of housing, commercial and learning spaces made possible by a partnership with the city and Cal State Fullerton.

“I was swept off my feet by how charming it was,” she said of the area.

The Santa Ana Hipcooks, led by manager and instructor Suzana Pinkerton, offers classes with fun names such as “Thai One On,” “Jamaican Me Crazy” and “The Cheese Whiz,” a session on making cheeses.

At the “Pasta in Casa!” class that Thompson attended, guests including Rancho Santa Margarita resident Delora Sandoval were learning how to make pasta from scratch.

Sandoval, a self-taught cook, discovered Hipcooks through a friend who gifted her a class for her birthday.

“A lot of foods I’ve tried here I’ve never had before, or would have never dreamed of making before,” she said. “I’m broadening my horizons. It’s cool learning how to make it yourself.”

Tustin residents Tammy and Richard Bostwick are fans of the classes, which have become a favorite date activity for the couple of nearly 22 years.

“It’s a nice activity — you can relax and eat and banter,” said Tammy Bostwick. “It brings us together.”

As students kneaded dough and shaped them into disks, something was conspicuously missing from the table.

No measuring cups. No measuring spoons. No recipe cards.

Recipes are emailed to students after the classes, but following a recipe isn’t the point of the classes, Reti said.

“In class, we’re not talking about ‘how the steps’ but ‘why the steps,’” Reti said. “Why read the recipe in person, as opposed to learning why you put this in and doing it yourself? It’s tasting along the way and figuring out what you can do to make it sing. We’re there not to show how something must be done but all the many ways you can create so many things.”

Pinkerton puts it this way.

“We pretty much play with our food,” she said. “We cook from the hip. That’s where the name comes from.”

This year, Hipcooks is expanding. Reti is hoping to open a new location in Woodland Hills by September, release a second cookbook by the end of the year and introduce two classes focusing on country French cuisine and Vietnamese street food in the coming months.

“Every class that we offer really supports the theory that the pleasure of the experience is directly in line with the creative process,” Reti said. “It’s not teaching people how to cook something. It’s about transforming that love of the process and getting in touch with your own inner chef.”