Food School celebrates ribbon cutting in Bowling Green
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WNKY) — The Food School celebrated an official ribbon cutting Thursday in Bowling Green, highlighting a business built around more than teaching people how to cook. Owner and instructor Anna Kulka said the goal is to use food from different cultures as a way for neighbors to meet, learn from one another and build connections.
Bringing neighbors to the same table
Kulka said the idea behind The Food School starts with a simple question: What is your neighbor making for dinner?
“Everybody says food brings people together, right? But we specifically bring people together around the idea of just what’s your neighbor making for dinner? It’s very casual, very social, very approachable,” Kulka said.
The school works with food partners from across Bowling Green who share recipes and cooking traditions from their own families. Kulka said those relationships often begin in their homes and kitchens before a class is offered to the public.
“We have food partners from all over Bowling Green who have kind of come up out of the woodwork,” she said. Kulka said those partners have “very generously opened their kitchens and their homes” so she can cook with them, learn from them and then share what she has learned with the wider community.
Food as a common language
For Kulka, the mission is personal. She recalled a neighbor who had lived in the United States for years but still struggled to feel connected to the wider community.
“What brings me so much joy is to bring the connection so people realize, oh, we’re not that different after all,” Kulka said. “We’re all feeding our families dinner. We’re all buying groceries right here. What are we going to make?”
She said cooking can create common ground even when language or cultural differences might otherwise make connecting difficult.
“And so food becomes a language that everybody can speak, that everybody can share, that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter all these other variables,” Kulka said. “Come to table. Come join us in the kitchen. Come be a community together.”
Connections that continue after class
Students at The Food School work in teams of four, putting people who may not know one another at the same cooking station and, eventually, the same table.
Kulka recalled one group that included an older Kentucky man, his daughter and two young Brazilian women. The four met while taking a Thai cooking class and ended up exchanging phone numbers.
“They signed up together to come take the computer class again so they could be Team Yellow,” Kulka said. “And that just makes my heart so happy.” She went on to describe how the group stayed connected after meeting through the class.
Kulka said experiences like that are the purpose of the school.
An appetite for something different
Kulka said the response from the Bowling Green community surprised her from the beginning.
The first class was initially meant to be a cautious test with friends and neighbors. Instead, people they did not know found the school online and signed up.
“Complete strangers found us on Facebook, bought full price tickets and showed up the first day,” Kulka said. “Okay, I guess there’s an interest. I guess people want to try different food. They want to learn how to cook it. They want to just both expand their palate and try new things.”
Keeping the recipes authentic
Kulka said local food partners remain closely involved in deciding what is taught and how dishes are prepared.
“What’s unique to the food school is that everybody here lives in Bowling Green, where we’re all neighbors, actually,” she said.
She said it is important that the school not simply pull recipes from online videos and present them as representative of an entire culture. Instead, each food partner has control over the menu and how that family’s version of a dish is prepared.
“I’m making it the way your family makes it,” Kulka said. “And there’s a million other families who make it a million ways.”
For Kulka, that variety is part of the point — giving more local voices a place in the kitchen while giving Bowling Green residents another way to get to know the people around them.
