Our Story

HOW IT ALL BEGAN.

Home Cooking New York (HCNY) was founded in May 2002, shortly after founder Jennifer Clair was downsized from her Food Editor position at Martha Stewart Living. After years of writing cookbooks, recipes, and food editorials, the opportunity to teach IRL seemed like the next logical step. Back then, Jennifer was the sole chef-instructor, teaching nightly private cooking classes in students’ home kitchens all over New York City. Over the last 20+ years, the company has grown to now include 6 outstanding chef-instructors (meet them all here!).

In 2009, HCNY opened its first brick-and-mortar public cooking school in the back kitchen of the “Inn on 23^rd Street” in Manhattan. Two years later, after the Inn decided to open a more-lucrative restaurant in that kitchen, HCNY began its 4-year nomadic phase, moving from one shared kitchen to another, in order to keep the school running. Then, after 11 years in business, HCNY finally dove into the NYC commercial real estate market and built out their dream teaching kitchen. After an 8-month search, HCNY opened up on the edge of SoHo and Chinatown, at 158 Grand Street. It is where you will find them to this day.

2020 UPDATE: We weathered the pandemic by moving all our cooking classes online, which allowed all our teachers to keep teaching and for us to maintain the rent on our beloved NYC teaching kitchen — along with various governmental small business loans and the kindness of our landlord — and we reopened for in-person classes in July 2021. Phew!

2023 EXPANSION UPDATE: Well, it turned out the people emerged from the pandemic with a very strong desire to learn how to cook. We could not offer enough sessions of our 6-week “Culinary Boot Camps” to satisfy student interest (30-person deep waitlists!), so we built out a second kitchen, right next door, and dubbed it “Boot Camp Kitchen.” And the feature that we love the most: Our landlord let us cut out a door to connect our two kitchens  so we can pop in and out of each other’s classes, like a real “workplace.” It’s a dream we didn’t even know we had.