Cooks Academy

Excellent cookery school in central Dublin.
Tim and Vanessa have set up the benchmark for cookery schools in Dublin.
All levels catered for, super equipment, and good practical teaching.
Looking forward to Jacks meat smoking course in Feb.

I have not had a course here but I want to comment on the quick responses I receive whenever I have an enquiry. I do look forward soon to being educated by the Cooks Academy tutors.
The main reason I am leaving a review is in response to Bren L. who complained about the Vietnamese cooking course not being tutored by a Vietnamese chef. Are you kidding me? So you’re saying it isn’t Vietnamese cooking because someone who isn’t Vietnamese is cooking it? Or it’s not Italian food because an Italian isn’t cooking it? Or it’s not a Swedish massage because the massage therapist isn’t Swedish? Come on, give me a break! Think about it… I think some people just enjoy having something to complain about.

Enquired about ‘Vietnamese’ cooking course they advertise.
Reply from them ’ The Tutor taking the class will be one of our qualified teaching tutors but none of them originate from Vietnam. As it is a general class on Vietnamese food, it would not be specifically from the North/​South of Vietnam.’
€ 150 for 6 hours, ‘but NONE OF THEM ORIGINATE FROM VIETNAM’ — Enough said… !
They seem not to have chefs from any of the regions they’re teaching about so how ‘authentic’ can the food be ??
How about Chinese chefs offering Irish cookery courses in Shanghai ???

Extraordinary experience. My wife and I attended a masterclass recently with Ross Lewis, of Chapter One, teaching. How great. He was an excellent teacher and while the recipes that we prepared — after his demonstration — were outstanding as well — the entire staff was very helpful and professional. We made risotto with peas and mushrooms and guinea hen wrapped in pancetta with a pork stuffing and mushroom sauce. Everything was set up to make the cooking experience easy, but informative. The staff and Ross were buzzing around offering helpful advice. It was a terrific experience and I would definitely go back to take other classes (and eat more delicious food).

To be fair, I’ve only had one experience of Cooks Academy but it was such an overwhelmingly positive one, I had to add it and review it.
I had received a voucher for a Chinese Cookery class (methinks there may have ben an ulterior motive involved: D) so last night, I headed into town to get my cook on.
The class ran from 6.30 — 9.00 and over the course of the evening, 5 dishes were demonstrated and we cooked 2. They started off by showing us how to make spare ribws. Well, it wasn’t so much the ribs that they demonstrated but the sauce to coat them in. Having tasted the ribs (and wanting to go back for the last few), it boded well for the rest of the evening.
Next up was sweet and sour duck with mango. «Uh oh», thought I as it sounded like something I probably wouldn’t be able to make. The tutor (Dave Rice) made it look so easy to make but the proof of the pudding would come when we attempted to make it ourselves. So off we went with our recipe sheet and pulled together the ingredients we’d need for this wonderful form of alchemy. So the ginger, saki, soy sauce etc was measured out, the duck breast crisped up and marinated and so on… until 20 mins later we started to tuck into our creations.
«Holy f**k…I made that? Really?»
Dave, the tutor, and his two assistants/​co-​chefs were on hand as we had set about our cooking and were always available to help out or advise or even just to find ingredients that had gone walkabout. They were so friendly and helpful that it all seemed to easy to be true.
Anyway, after that it was back to the demo table for some beef with oyster sauce. So we were shown how to put this together, how to make the marinate and so on. He also showed us how to cook rice, which sounds trivial but I’ve tasted too many DIY rice jobs that tasted like they’d come out of an Ambrosia tin to know it’s not an easy thing to do (and I won’t even delve into my own efforts).
So off we went again, to create dishes that, to me, tasted good. Same again, they were always on hand to help out, put us at ease, relax and not be afraid to cook as can often be the case.
After that, he showed us how to use leftover rice to make a really tasty egg-​fried rice and offered a couple of tips on food hygiene in relation to rice.
The final dish to be demonstrated was pak choi with onion and red cabbage topped with roasted cashew nuts. Another top, top dish. It wasn’t something we’d time to try there but I definitely will.
Confidence boosted and feeling like I went from beginner to 9^th Dan Black Belt over the two and a half hours, I’ll be off to the Asian Market on Drury Street at the weekend to buy a load of stuff.
I will be back to Cooks Academy. And I’lll be recommending it to anyone I know that likes to cook or would like to. There was a good cross section last night with some being reasonably confident cooks and others not even confident that they could make toast. Yet everyone came away feeling like they could cook better than they had at 6pm yesterday!
A1 Sharon!