We are a small, intimate cooking school in the prettiest town in the entire sunny, south of Italy (and the region's only full-time cooking school, in either language). Here folks smile when they see you, ask where you’re from. We’re located in the gorgeous, baroque city of Lecce, the vibrant cultural capital of the Salento, the stiletto heal of Italy’s famous boot. Widely acknowledged inside of Italy as having the best produce, healthiest and most intriguing cuisine, and the warmest, most gregarious and welcoming people, it's where Italy itself comes to holiday. Ask an Italian about Puglia and you're likely to hear a pleasurable sigh.
We do things differently. Our philosophy is simple: you can only learn so much by watching someone else ride a bike. In short, we don't contribute to the fiction that dumping pre-prepped ingredients into a saute pan is really teaching, nor watching it, really learning.
By Day Two of a typical week you'll have garlic under your fingernails, semolina flour hand-prints on your apron and maybe a hotspot on the side of your hand from a chef's knife. And your face will probably hurt from laughing so much.
By the morning of Day Three you'll be stepping up to use your new Italian to chit-chat in with Simone the vegetable guy, making jam with Sergio in the afternoon and then grilling a sea bass over olive wood coals at night. By Day Four your orrecchiette will suddenly stop looking like mangled row boats. By Day Five you'll no longer feel compelled to follow recipes, and you'll be on your way to cooking in a new way, learning to cook by paying more attention when you eat, enjoying what you're eating more because you cooked it.
In all starts in the market, where the world-famous produce from the sunny south of Italy is at your fingertips. We'll browse beautiful displays of fish that have never been even refrigerated, the clams still squirting, the shrimp still wiggling. Sweet and pulpy tomatoes, suggestive enough to make the pope blush. You'll crunch into bread, hard and crusty outside, dreamy and yellow inside. Depending on your visit, you may get the chance to meet the people who help us make our organic house wine, which is as black as sin and twice as tasty. You'll grill lamb, rabbits and chicken, organic meat that has never done time inside plastic wrap abed a styrofoam tray. And working with all these ingredients, you will gain a sober insight into the Salento’s historic poverty, and how this delicious, heart-breaking and inventive cuisine was their means to combat it.
And even in a week we can give you the Italian language skills to chitchat with our greengrocer and to greet Antonella, the flirty fish monger. You'll get a sense of our local history—not in dates to remember, but by what you see around you, the sense of the place. You'll learn to see architecture in ways you can’t on slides in darkened lecture rooms. It’s different when you can touch it, walk inside, and have it explained by the descendants of the culture that formed it. Time it right, and you'll pick figs right off our own fig tree, take a basket and set of shears and gather herbs for dinner from our garden. You'll learn to make gelato, we'll eat it together, taking some to Antonio the granita guy. And just as a typical week is never all that typical, together we'll spend an afternoon canning and jarring the season’s bounty, each week, whatever is in season. Our typical week always changes, whether it's field trips to wine cellars, olive mills or local, dinky food festivals. Maybe it's a street concert, a local folk dance recital for ten year olds, the mayor showing up to give a speech. Often we spend an afternoon in the countryside, at a friend's, grilling under the stars. No two weeks are ever the same but all of them reflect the season you choose to visit.
Programs
We have numerous programs designed to fit every budget and every schedule. We offer full week, weekend, and day, special and custom classes. The full week classes are offered on according to a pre-set schedule (see Calendar). The Weekend, Day, and Custom classes are available upon request during any time not already scheduled. If interested, simply Contact Us and let us know what you would like to do. Occasionally, we will add Special Classes to our normal calendar. These classes are usually set around special guests or special events and are usually announced in our newsletters.
Widely acknowledged inside of Italy as having the best produce, healthiest and most intriguing cuisine, and the warmest, most gregarious and welcoming people, it's where Italy itself comes to holiday. Ask an Italian about Puglia and you're likely to hear a pleasurable sigh.
Faculty Information:
Owner-Director - Silvestro Silvestori. With multiple degrees from both Italian and American universities, 'Sylvester' has worked as a baker, a butcher, a wine merchant, a wedding cake decorator and as a waiter in over thirty different restaurants. He's taught photography (all the photographs on the site are his), Italian and English grammar, and too, his first love, Italian cooking lessons, in his adopted town of Lecce, birthplace of his great grand-parents.
Not that it's only about Mediterranean seafood and our organic house wine, here in Lecce you'll also gain context, learn to see the ongoing local dialogs between art and food, history and language, religion and place, and how any real understanding need always be systemic.
Other Activities:
Work the harvest, meet the locals, have lunch in the countryside with your adopted Southern Italian grandparents. Lecce is something of a minor hub in southern Italy: it is easy to connect to both other Italian cities, as well as ferries bound for Greece. Many of our guests elect to spend a few days in the arrival city—inevitably Roma—then come to cook with us for the week, spending a few additional days in the south, afterward.
Facility Information:
A beautiful palace in the historic center of Lecce, a walled medieval city. Two kitchens, one is set in the converted stables, that opens onto the city garden.
Our students stay at a charmingly-typical Lecce B&B less than a minute (you can hold your breath and still make it there from here) walk from The Awaiting Table Italian Cooking School, in the beautiful historic center of Lecce. It's where we'd like to stay if were visiting the city of Lecce.
Awake each morning to the rich, baroque tones of Lecce’s bell tower. Stay within steps of the city’s duomo, main piazza, world-class shopping and Gracious Antonio’s espresso bar, our rendezvous point each morning (and easily the best espresso in the entire south of Italy.)
Notes:
PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE CLOSED DURING THE MONTH OF AUGUST
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Cooking schools
Europe
Italy
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