Meals to Learn By: Chef Mark Eastman and Chefs' Haven
Three couples sit around a small, L-shaped bar, nibbling on appetizers, sipping on glasses of chilled rosé, chatting with the chef working above a small stovetop only a couple of feet away. There is an intimacy in the ease of conversation and in the smallness of the room. No one else is here to distract from what is happening, no other diners or servers on the eating side of the bar, no sous chefs or line cooks hovering at the chef’s elbow on the other.
The chef squirts some amber liquid from an unmarked bottle, then without looking grabs a kitchen blow torch with his right hand. A flame shoots out and a pouf of fire explodes over the pan. The chef responds to the oohs and ahhs with a smile as he shakes the pan and the flame disappears.
This is cooking as performance art, and the audience has been invited to join the show. But it’s neither an intimate night at a chef’s table at a fancy restaurant near Union Square nor an evening at an experimental theater in Soho. It’s a private cooking class in Hockessin, Delaware with Chef Mark Eastman as the professor and the range his lectern.
While there are many ways to sharpen your cooking skills, from watching YouTube to thumbing through new cookbooks to following along with your favorite TV food show, few are as much fun, as informative or as calor-icious as attending an in-person class with Chef Eastman at his small cooking counter.
“I started here in 2008, at first with just cooking classes,” Eastman says on a quiet afternoon in his storefront gourmet-shop-cum-demo-kitchen on Old Lancaster Pike in Hockessin. “Then we added a few culinary items – cheeses and chocolates – then I started making loaves and baguettes of fresh bread.”
As he talks behind the counter where his utilitarian kitchen is located, Eastman does simple prep work for the next evening’s class. “Tomorrow night, the theme is New Orleans Flare,” he says, “with crab Creole, oyster stew, crab étouffée, Bourbon bread pudding. It’s sold out – in fact most of my upcoming classes are sold out.”
Eastman looks like one of those mild-mannered guys you see in the movies – solidly built, ruddy cheeks, neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, curly brown hair that creeps down over his ears – who with minimum provocation would whip off his no-nonsense glasses and clean house.
“Mostly everyone wants to have a good time and learn a few things they didn’t know,” he says, “Some come for the entertainment. And I have one regular who signs up just to have a good meal.” What about know-it-alls who want to impress their fellow classmates? “Yeah, occasionally, but not too many. I just ask them a few questions, like what restaurants they worked in, and they calm down.”
Eastman, not surprisingly, has worked in quite a few himself. “I had been an executive chef for more than 20 years before I started Chefs’ Haven,” he says. “The last eight years was for Sodexo, but before that I worked for Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia and the Dilworthtown Inn. And I helped launch The Gables,” a popular upscale restaurant in Chadds Ford.
Of course, one of the best-known and most-influential chefs in the Middle Atlantic region during this time was George Perrier, owner of Le Bec Fin and Le Brasserie Perrier off the Main Line. Perrier was famous – as are many accomplished chefs – for being difficult to work for. But Eastman quickly comes to the late chef’s defense. “That was just with some people,” he says. “George and I got along fine. George was great – if you knew what you were doing.”
Eastman uses all this experience to offer a wide variety of class subjects – that is, meals to learn by – including “sampling” what other chefs have done or the styles of other cultures. One class might be a menu from the French Laundry, he says, and another one might be from the Inn at Little Washington.
For private dinners, he is also willing to try most ideas that a customer can come up with. “We also work with dietary needs and preferences. We’ve done all-vegan dinners, and we’ve done dinners that feature red meat. Some have requests for no shellfish or no gluten.”
But while the whole purpose of Eastman’s classes as meals is customer interaction, the diners are not there to play chef. “We don’t do hands-on unless it’s something they need to touch to learn,” Eastman says. “Sometimes we do that with pasta or when we have a sushi meal. But you can learn a lot by just following along as I prepare the meal. And I also give them the recipes from the evening.” To save time, Eastman does all the prep work in advance, “but I always finish the dish in class.”
A typical dinner lesson consists of either four or five courses, and the regular rate is between $85 to $110 per person. “But I’ve been asked to prepare meals with more expensive ingredients,” Eastman says, “such as lobster and caviar, and these might be as much as $200.” And as he’s not licensed to sell alcohol, class is strictly BYOB.
Each class will have a minimum of 6 people and a maximum of 10. Schedules are posted on his website, six months at a time, and they usually fill up quickly.
Because of his extended background, Eastman sources ingredients both locally and with food purveyors in Philadelphia and New York. “I work a lot with Harvest Market on the other side of the road,” he says. He also likes to forage, especially for wild mushrooms. “And, no, I’m not going to tell you where,” he says with a grin.
If life were an elaborate dinner, then Eastman would be beginning to finish the cheese course. “I’ve begun scaling back just a bit,” he says. But, he says, he’s not yet ready to retire. Chef Mark still has plenty of time to prep for dessert.
Chefs' Haven
1304 Old Lancaster Pike, Hockessin, Delaware
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