Cooking Class - Pasta Making at a Local Craft Beer Bar in Raleigh

Chef Lucas did a very good job, and we enjoyed this class very much. I gave this experience a 4 star review because I was surprised that the class was at a bar. I had expected it to be held at a cooking school, office location, or a restaurant.

This class has a lot of potential, unfortunately the setting wasn't conducive to teaching or learning with the number of students in the class (25). We learned how to mix Masa with water/oil, form it into balls, and only some of the class got to make tortillas before the electrical circuits were tripped and both of the hot plates stopped working (yes, 25 people, cooking 6 tortillas each, 1min. Per side and 2 hot plate / skillets to accomplish the whole exercise). We had hoped for knife skills training (as advertised) and some tips or techniques for protein processing and cooking, aside from being shown how to quarter a tomato, no knife skills were introduced. The recipe was only available via. QR code, the meat was prepared and marinated before hand, and cooked by his sous-chef while we learned to mix Masa. The pico felt like it was enough produce for 12 people to make Pico, that was stretched into 25, we were encouraged to try our pico with some supplied tortilla chips, but if you ate any of your pico, you would have had to eat a plain taco (tortilla and beef only). Ultimately we were fortunate enough to have made a few tortillas before the grid went down, and we saved enough pico to get a few "real tacos" out of it all, but we ran past the 2 hours to make that happen, it seemed like half the class just left abruptly at 2 hours, while others added the beef to their pico bowl and ate it like a salad bowl for lack of having cooked tortillas. Fewer people, staggered application of lessons (so there isn't a line of 25 people waiting for a cup of water), and training on more than JUST making tortillas would have helped make the class more of a learning experience and less of lesson in patience.

We made tortillas and pico for tacos. We couldn’t cook them because the power was overloaded and kept shutting off. While I liked Chef Lucas, the class was too full for the amount of cooking stations available. We had to wait in long lines to complete the tortillas and it was very discombobulated.