Comfort Food
Serving up the globally diverse flavors of an America in transition, dissolving some of the boundaries attempting to keep us apart
The League of Kitchens, a culturally immersive cooking school in New York City, has a waiting list—and it’s no wonder. In just 10 short years, it has become a delicious cross-cultural feast of connections, cooked up by grandmothers, some in their 80s, from all over the world—and cherished here now, more than ever.
NEW YORK—One of the things I still love about living in New York City—even in these wildly challenging times, especially for many of our nation’s newest citizens—is that it remains the cross-cultural heart of the American experience and experiment, in both good times and bad. Here, legally, there are more people from different countries, different backgrounds and speaking different languages than any other place in the world.
Scott Stone, my advertising director for Contribute, a magazine I co-founded and ran for a while in the early oughts about social change, still shares my deep respect for the city’s diversity. Long before Anthony Bourdain made it uber-cool to have cross-cultural conversations while noshing on all sorts of international cuisine, Scott would take me and our small Contribute staff “around the world in 3 hours” by visiting some of the most fascinating and culturally rich neighborhoods in Queens. Each time, we'd visit a new corner of the borough and meet a new set of global street and restaurant chefs serving us samples of the specialities Scott had invited them to make for us—samosa chaat from India, lahmacun (Turkish pizza), or sometimes a hearty serving of Egyptian koshari. Once, Scott herded us all via subway up to the Bronx, for some “Michelin star-worthy” cannolis, handmade daily in a Sicilian sausage shop still run by the Italian family who founded it shortly after fleeing their bombed-out city of Palermo at the close of the second world war.
But it wasn't until last month—nearly 20 years after those unforgettable sojourns with Scott [the same two decades during which Pew Research says our nation’s racial and ethnic diversity increased to near record highs]—that I was invited back to Queens. But this time, I was told to skip the street food and go straight to the home kitchens of some of the immigrant grandmothers making (and teaching) the family recipes they took with them to America.
So I went back to Queens, to check out this new League of Kitchens—a new kind of cooking school—and to meet its young founder and some of the grandmothers named to its teaching roster of top chefs, each from a different nation—Afghanistan, Greece, Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Korea, Nepal and Uzbekistan, for starters.
The League of Kitchens
Founder and CEO Lisa Kyung Gross is a product of a cross-cultural exchange, herself. Her dad descended from a family of Hungarian Jews, and her mom immigrated from Korea in the early ‘70s. Lisa’s Korean grandmother lived with the family when Lisa was growing up. “My grandma cooked all of this amazing Korean food all the time,” Lisa said in an interview. But whenever Lisa volunteered to help her in the kitchen, “grandma would always shoo me away and say, ‘Go study. That’s more important.’” When her grandmother died, Lisa was 21. After earning her master’s degree from Tufts University and a bachelor’s from Yale, Lisa got into cooking, and tried to re-create her grandmother’s dishes, even after poring over books and You Tube videos.
“But nothing tasted right, like it would when my grandmother made it,” Lisa said. “I realized that so often, small nuances or tricks are the difference between something tasting good and tasting amazing. You have to learn those things from a grandma. You can’t learn them from a cook book. So I started fantasizing about how amazing it would be to find people like my grandmother from all over the world in New York City that you could cook with and learn their family recipes.”
And then she took action, taking classes from all the major cooking schools in New York City to observe how they operated. And then she began her search for a culinary A-team. The requirements? “They had to be immigrants,” she said. “They couldn’t be professionally trained but needed to have a deep knowledge of food tradition, be comfortable teaching in English and be outgoing enough to share their personal stories and host strangers in their own homes.” Also, their food had to be unforgettably delicious.
Fully baked
Today, the League has 14 chefs. Each chef typically has 6 students visiting her kitchen every weekend, to teach them how to make a variety of recipes handed down through the generations.
When Lisa founded the League in 2014, it quickly started getting national attention. Saveur magazine called it “the multicultural cooking school you’ve been waiting for.” When the League began offering some classes online during COVID, The Wall Street Journal said its instruction “was actually worth its salt.” One of the League’s biggest promotional successes came back in 2016, when Lisa nabbed a guest spot on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Colbert took one of the classes.
The Curriculum
Each 5-hour class starts with a welcome lunch, then teaches students some recipes and ends, three hours later, with a dinner, to eat what was just made in class.
Each dish differs widely from class to class. At chef Yamini Moshi’s Kew Gardens apartment (which Colbert visited), students learn how to stuff baby eggplants with a variety of spices, chickpea flour and cilantro. At chef Larisa Frumkin’s Jackson Heights apartment, the 89-year-old Ukrainian grandmother teaches students how to make sharlotka s yablokami, which translates from Russian to English as Charlotte with Apples. In chef Mirta Rinaldi’s Forest Hills apartment, students learn the secrets of Argentine grilling. And so on.
But while the food is always a hit, the stories shared over dinner by the chefs and their students also make an impression, and help to transcend some of the divisions whipped up this past year by political campaign rhetoric and anti-immigrant sentiment.
One student, after spending nearly 6 hours with chef Yamini, said Yamini told her students after a particularly good set of story-sharing over dinner: “Today, you are not my guests. We cooked in my kitchen, together, so we belong to each other as a family now. I’m really thankful for that.”
Me too.
And now I’m thanking the gods I kept my grandmother’s Czech recipes. Her knedliky and zeli [dumplings and saurkraut] dishes always brought people together because of their unique and exceptional taste, and still do—long enough to keep people talking, and sharing, and sometimes? Long enough to re-discover what no longer divides us—or what never really did.