A culinary education

At least twice a month, passionate chefs and hungry students gather for cooking classes offered by Explore Culinary Arts at the Atherton Appliance and Kitchens showroom in Redwood City.

Eager pupils range from newlyweds to sweet 16 party-goers, but most are groups from companies like Facebook, Groupon and Google seeking creative team-building activities outside the office.

Through cooking classes, personal chef services and corporate team-building events, the company aims to teach that cooking a fresh, wholesome meal can be a fun — and manageable — feat.

“I think the mindset still exists that people don’t have the time or the interest to cook,” said Teena Arora, founder of Explore Culinary Arts. “But if I can just show them that it’s not treacherous, they can make meals in 30 minutes.”

Arora grew up in the restaurant industry. Her parents owned multiple businesses in Minneapolis, including an Indian restaurant that she said attracted the likes of Prince and members of Led Zeppelin. Her experience working there stayed with her, though she never aspired to open her own restaurant, calling it a “tiresome” undertaking.

Instead, she directed her passion for food toward educating others about the importance and joy of cooking for oneself.

While in college in Minneapolis, Arora began to offer classes at a local adult school and a Whole Foods Market through her personal company, Currysutra, which focuses mainly on vegetarian and vegan cuisine.

For many years, Currysutra was Arora’s creative outlet on evenings and weekends. She still operates the company but is now focusing on Explore. Arora started Explore with a friend and colleague, Tony Dietz, after deciding to leave her corporate job in 2016.

Explore offers a range of culinary services, with aspirations to expand in the future. Personal-cooking services vary by client — for example, the Explore team has cooked a week’s worth of meals for some clients and taught private classes for others. Personal chef services cost $99 per hour with a minimum of three hours and a flat $50 fee is charged for groceries, with a travel fee for customers located farther north than South San Francisco and farther south than Sunnyvale.

Explore has also served as a restaurant consultant for a vegan restaurant in San Jose, where Arora’s team created 12 new menu items.

The chef-instructors at Explore bring a wealth of knowledge to the kitchen, she said. Amy Fothergill, for example, has 25 years of cooking experience in restaurants and hotels and is the author of a gluten-free cookbook. Another is Bruno Ponsot, who was born, raised and trained in France and has won 12 medals in American Culinary Federation-sanctioned cooking competitions.

Explore Culinary Arts offers a variety of classes, ranging from $100 to $250 per person, that can be tailored to meet different goals. (Be sure to check with the chef before registering, though, as each sets his or her own price points, and some have a minimum number of students required.)

Arora runs a tight ship in her classes. She will spend three to four hours prepping the ingredients for her corporate team-building classes and baking the dessert, which is always on the house.

Students arrive to find stations instructing them on how to prepare a particular course of the meal. Throughout the evening, the Explore team offers helpful tips on how to best prepare the ingredients and swiftly cleans the space as the night progresses.

Varun Sood, a director of engineering at Groupon, recently attended an Indian/Mediterranean cuisine-themed class with some of his colleagues. Together, they made chicken kebabs, a Mediterranean salad, potatoes and pakora, a fritter made of vegetables and sometimes meat.

“I don’t think we’ve ever talked so much to each other outside of this class,” he said.

With pop music playing overhead and wine glasses in hand, participants get a casual setting in which to chat about non-work matters — and tease one another about their chopping skills.

As the students eat the dinner they just worked together to prepare, Arora and her staff quietly eat dinner of their own and within 10 minutes are bustling in the kitchen once again — washing dishes, clearing the space and plating dessert.

The Explore staff works quickly, and with customers always in sight, the team is required to be “on” all evening, but with none of the drama that cooking shows might lead students to expect. (Arora said she was, however, recently approached by “Chopped,” a Food Network cooking competition show, which is searching for Bay Area chefs to participate.)

“It’s a culinary orchestra and we all have a part to play,” Arora said.

Arora said she hopes to expand her offerings in the future to include pop-up dinner tastings, cookbook clubs, mindful eating and wellness seminars, Ayurvedic cooking, workshops for industry professionals and culinary tours.