Make Bread, Break Bread

It’s a decidedly democratic approach, with no separation between the kitchen and dining space. The layout is simple and recognizable — a space rendered accessible to the full spectrum of seasoned celebrity chefs and grandmothers alike. From its whirring fans to blue tiles and bright red chairs, the atmosphere remains unfussy and pleasant — not unlike attending a friend’s dinner party two hours early and promptly donning an apron.

Cooking classes at the Depanneur often unfold with this colloquial spirit in mind — an ease helped by the chefs themselves, many of whom first learned to thrive as home cooks before making a foray into the food industry. One such chef is Erika Araujo, whose demanding profession as a nurse in Mexico City kept her out of the kitchen. It wasn’t until she arrived in Canada that the inextricable bond linking food to identity began to crystallize. “When I immigrated, my family was so homesick that it pushed me to cook,” she says.

Araujo’s classes encompass staples of Mexican cuisine such as sopasand tlacoyos. In a class on salsas, she demonstrates how sauces are a kind of culinary lingua franca spoken across the highly regional cuisines of Mexico. To that end, Araujo hopes to dispense with the impersonal gentrification of Mexican food as overpriced Baja fish tacos. Her classes, like many offered by the Depanneur, are rooted in the complex generational histories of food.

Yet the generational histories contained in some cuisines are still in the process of being pioneered. For pastry chef Mel Boccia, time in the kitchen is less about traditional food ways manifested in childhood dinners, but rather about developing what that might look like in a vegan framework. The São Paolo native began cooking in earnest after becoming vegan in meat and dairy-centric Brazil. “You don’t have much help, you know. This lack of support is kind of very nebulous,” Boccia says. “You have to do it yourself.” It’s an entrepreneurial spirit befitting the show-and-tell style of a class on vegan ice creams, where Boccia and fellow chef Melanie Richard pass around scoops of lemon pineapple cardamom sorbet; toppings such as sunflower halva, macerated berries and pistachios sit tantalizingly off to the side. While the goal of the class is first and foremost to teach, Richard sees the Depanneur model as carte blanche to reconnect with what makes chefs passionate about food. “I like the independence, and basically what you’re able to do here,” she explains. “You get to explore your own in-depth qualities of what you have to offer.”

The rising popularity of cooking classes marks a shifting trend in consumerism — one that places value on experiences over material goods, but also speaks to society’s unprecedented interest in food as a whole. “Food itself is an incredibly powerful vector. It has this incredible superpower to leap across language and culture and gender and history — to connect people. To share in what is essentially one of the most fundamental of all human experiences,” Senater says. “There hasn’t ever been anyone who doesn’t eat.”