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If you’re looking for a unique and useful dock and dine, consider small group culinary schools for home cooks run by the chefs or owners themselves along the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico. These hands-on, highly social experiences offer a variety of menus, a delicious meal at the end, and new culinary skills to take back to the galley.
Most classes are dinners, but brunches and lunches are also available, as are private classes curated for a group of friends looking for that “something different” in a shoreside excursion. Here’s a sampling:
Salt Water Farm Cooking School
Near Camden, ME
In this family farmhouse overlooking Penobscot Bay, learn to cook New England coastal classics such as local oysters with mignonette, lobster stew and halibut steaks. Hands-on classes set in a converted cedar-beam barn from May to October focus on farm-to-table, regional and international fare. The founder and instructor, Annemarie Ahearn, worked at Saveur magazine, cooked with Tom Colicchio of Top Chef fame, and teaches classes in France and Mexico in the early spring and fall. “Classes are three hours, hands-on, and we enjoy the meal outside in the garden,” says Ahearn, whose cookbook, Modern Country Cooking: Kitchen Skills and Seasonal Recipes from Salt Water Farm, is for sale as a nice take-home keepsake.
Norwell, MA
Handmade egg pasta, clam chowder, seafood paella, and warm and cold lobster rolls, plus desserts like panna cotta, flourless chocolate cake, and mini carrot cakes are on class menus with Abby Gray. Once a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill for a political magazine, Gray followed her passion, graduated from Boston University Culinary School, and cooked with famous Master Chef Jacques Pepin. “I love to teach and always encourage lots of interaction, from answering questions to guiding each technique,” says Gray, whose cooking studio is in her home, 25 minutes south of Boston and 5 miles west of Scituate Harbor. Knife skills, Indian cuisine, Mediterranean meals, gluten-free, and kid’s classes are among the offerings.
Milford, CT
Prepare a French bistro-style dinner: steak au poivre, roasted caramelized tomatoes with stilton, haricot verts with caramelized shallots, and lavender crème brulé. This is one of many cuisines Heide Lang, founder and culinary director, teaches to classes of 15 to 20 participants at a time. Trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York, Lang’s school is the namesake for her three daughters — Francesca, Isabella and Gabrielle. It’s housed in a quaint storefront on Naugatuck Avenue. “Bringing strangers together through food! The experience is truly one of a kind,” says Lang. Italian Family Dinner, When in Rome, Dinner in Normandy and a Night in Marrakech are a few of the international cuisine themes.
Baltimore, MD
The Art of Making Pasta is one of the most popular classes of over 200 menus offered by chef/owner, Amy von Lange, who trained at New York City’s International Culinary Center and spent six months in Italy cooking at fine dining restaurants in Parma and Sicily. “You learn it’s easy to make pasta like agnolotti and orecchiette from scratch. We introduce different sauces like a mushroom ragout and sausage with arugula pesto.” Several classes feature Maryland seafood, with participants learning how to shuck oysters, make a mignonette, and fry and roast oysters with different toppings.
Solomons Island, MD
John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman and Robert Mitchum ate in this spot when it was the Bowen Inn. Chef Gwyn Novak’s great-grandfather founded the inn in 1918, and her family rebuilt on the same spot after a tragic fire destroyed the inn in 2006. Today, class participants, working in four groups of four people each, prepare three-course meals with a panoramic view of the water. Mediterranean, a Murder Mystery Dinner, 30-Minute Meals, and Chesapeake Bay Classic Oysters are among the themes. “Farm to table, where every ingredient down to the salt is sourced locally, and regional classics like Smith Island Cake and St. Mary’s Stuffed Ham, are favorites,” says Novak, a Baltimore International College culinary graduate, and author of cookbooks, How to Cook for Beginners and One Pot Supreme. Guest chef instructors include Michelin-star restaurateur Robert Wiedmaier, who took participants step-by- step to prepare foie gras ravioli and crispy Long Island duck.
In the Kitchen with Chef Bob Waggoner
Charleston, SC
Dinner party meets cooking class is the best way to describe Waggoner’s three-hour, meat-fish-dessert, participant-prepared meals with no more than two to a pan. Classes take place in his historic district showcase kitchen and are limited to 12 people. As much entertainer as chef (he won an Emmy for his Off the Menu TV show with Turner South), Waggoner regals students with culinary stories from his days helping to define Charleston’s cuisine in the 1990s to working at Michelin-star restaurants in France. He shares his culinary secrets, too. “I have one big square table where we all eat together. There are gold leaf plates, paired wines and a player piano for music in the background,” says Waggoner.
Savannah, GA
Learn to make southern-style pralines and Lowcountry favorites such as shrimp and grits and country captain chicken from Chef Darin Sehnert, a Johnson & Wales University culinary graduate, whose cooking school is in the city’s picturesque Victorian district. Participants don aprons and follow along as Sehnert teaches everything from the basics like knife skills to multi-course meals. Latin, Thai, Italian, Spanish and Asian are among the cuisines he covers. Yet it’s a taste of place that draws students. “A popular class is the fried chicken social. It includes shrimp deviled eggs, quick braised collards, Savannah red rice and buttermilk pie,” says Sehnert.
West Palm Beach, FL
If you ever wondered what it was like to dine on the Titanic, here’s your chance. David Cole, celebrity chef and author of cookbooks, Don’t Burn It and Take It or Leave It, offers immersive culinary experiences. These include The Great Gatsby, Arabian Nights and Love in Paris. “Menus change monthly, with each three-course meal having its own unique theme, music and décor,” says Cole. On the Titanic First Class Night, you make cognac shrimp to start, a potato lyonnaise and imperial chicken entrée with a parfait de eclair for dessert.
Hands-On Cooking with Giuliano Hazan
Sarasota, FL
The only son of Marcella Hazan, whose cookbooks introduced Americans to traditional Italian cooking techniques, Giuliano is a celebrity chef and cookbook author. His Classic Pasta Cookbook has been translated into 12 languages. “Everybody has their own workstation. I demonstrate techniques like chopping onions and peeling tomatoes, and then we all do the same and everybody helps,” says Chef Giuliano, whose four-hour classes are held in his and his wife’s home on the Phillippi Creek about 4 miles from Safe Harbor Siesta Key marina. Examples of a four-course menu include risotto with asparagus, marinated green beans, baked salmon in a pouch and strawberry gelato, all with Italian wine.
New Orleans, LA
Learn to combine European, Native American, African and South American ingredients to make authentic New Orleans gumbo, shrimp etouffee and bananas foster. “Our proven recipes have been handed down through the generations of our culinary team’s families. The most popular class is the Cajun/Creole roux class,” says Chef Liam Doran, operations manager, who previously worked for NOLA restaurants in the Windsor Court Hotel and Ritz-Carlton New Orleans on Canal Street. “Our jumbo shrimp and crabs are caught daily by local fishermen from the Gulf of Mexico. We use the finest smoked andouille sausage and tasso ham made for us by Poche Deli in Lafayette, and our vegetables come from local farms on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.”
Chefs such as Kristin Alpine, owner of Wildflowers & Fresh Food, in Fairhope, AL, on Mobile Bay, will arrive with the ingredients and teach easy yet flavorful recipes including black bean and mango chili, chickpeas and roasted garlic soup, grapefruit and kale salad with cashews. “I’ve done classes over a burner at a campsite, so a galley is easy,” says Alpine, who is also a registered nurse. If you catch a fish while cruising, she can teach you how to make several 10-minute toppers that can also jazz up chicken. Citrus salsa verde, Thai pickled shallots, and carrot ginger dressing, to name a few. Brunch, picnics, build a charcuterie board, dinner party, cooking with kids, and sips and party fare are some of Alpine’s themed classes. “Or tell me what you want. I’ll put together five menus, and you select the one you’d like me to teach.”
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