What’s Cooking in Kitchen 66
Author: KateLynn Dunning, Kitchen 66 Program Director
If Van Gogh were alive today, he would be a chef.
Food and cooking have a magic artistry that burrows itself deep inside of my heart. Chefs take ingredients from the soil and transform them onto a blank canvas of white china. Food needs to be seeded, nurtured, grown, and harvested. Kitchens are full of fire, knives, banging pots and pans, cooks and servers shouting; a symphony of chaos. Colors, textures, aromas, flavors, and memories are simmered together to reveal an experience on a plate. Cooks, sommeliers, and servers appear like rockstars, covered in tattoos and loudly debate the intricacies of sous vide, spatchcocking, and the Maillard reaction. Can you not see Van Gogh bargaining over edible flowers or spooning sage-blackberry puree in swaths under a seared pork belly?
This is the exciting world I craved to be a part of. At eighteen, I said goodbye to neon orange and vibrant magenta Tulsa sunsets and drove to Hyde Park, New York to attend the Culinary Institute of America. After graduating with my Bachelor in Professional Studies for Hospitality Management and Culinary Arts, I worked in Charleston, South Carolina; New York City; and spent three weeks abroad in Italy studying food, wine, and agriculture. I had learned and experienced so much: cooking in five diamond rated hotels, expediting in Michelin starred restaurants, passing the Introductory to the Sommelier Exam of the Court of Master Sommeliers Americas, and working as a free-lance food writer and photographer. In 2015, it was time to come home.
Culinary Institute of America: KateLynn foraging for mushrooms
Like a honing steel, my journey continued to narrow to my destination. I worked in private clubs, convention centers, concert centers, and as a Culinary Instructor. My journey finally brought me to the Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation and Kitchen 66. Stumbling upon a non-profit whose mission statement centers around empowering Tulsa food entrepreneurs by decreasing barriers associated with big ideas felt like fate. Combining my love for education, community involvement, and the magic artistry of the culinary world, took my breath away. Here was a company, a group of individuals, who wanted the very same things I did: to make my community the best it could be by supporting the brave local artists and entrepreneurs who comprise it!
As Kitchen 66 Program Director I am honored and excited to loudly cheer, celebrate, and mentor Tulsa’s amazing cutting edge culinary entrepreneurs. Standing behind these entrepreneurs I see the canvas being painted. The picture? Tulsa becoming the culinary hotspot of the Midwest.