PORT TOWNSEND — The Kitchen at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, a nonprofit cooking school which aims to teach culinary skills to children and adults, has started at the fairgrounds.
Chef Arran Stark, who will lead the effort, has long seen a need to strengthen Port Townsend’s restaurant workforce with strong food and drink training.
“The hope is that kids learn cooking as a life skill,” he said. “A percentage of those kids will take it on as a career, and a percentage of those people will stick around and help flourish the tourist industry in Port Townsend. Any restaurateur you come across, you’re only as strong as your weakest link. You can be the best chef in the world, but if you don’t have skilled labor to back you up, then it’s for naught.”
Stark said the school, which will operate under the Jefferson County Fairgrounds nonprofit umbrella, is a dream come true.
“We’re incredibly excited to see and be a part of Arran’s dream coming to life — to grow the Kitchen at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds into a vibrant hub for culinary education, where locals and youth alike can learn, share and flourish,” said Karly Mishko, Jefferson County Fairgrounds’ executive director.
Stark, Jefferson Healthcare’s executive chef, said he plans to finish his career with the hospital, but his plan for retirement is to teach children to cook.
And to build stand-up paddle boards, and to have a cool sail boat, and to drive a classic Porsche, Stark joked at the end of his two-hour lecture on the methods of cooking with vegetables.
The Porsche, Stark clarified, is not important. The kitchen is.
The lecture was one of a five-part fundraising lecture and demonstration series for the school. The first lecture focused on salad, the next on soup. The two remaining lectures will focus on salmon and chicken.
The kitchen is located in the Oscar Erickson Building at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, 4907 Landes St., and is already outfitted.
“The kitchen includes a flat-top grill, a char grill, six burners, a double-stack convection oven, a steamer and a full walk-in refrigerator along with two additional walk-in coolers and a walk-in freezer — all commercial-grade equipment pulled from the old Jefferson Healthcare kitchen before its remodel,” Stark said.
The kitchen also is an important community asset for community food storage in the case of emergencies, Stark said.
Jefferson Healthcare built the kitchen when during construction of its recently opened wing, kitchen staff was displaced.
One option was to lease a mobile kitchen unit during the construction process, but Stark said that option would leave the community with nothing when the hospital’s new kitchen was in place.
He rode his bike around Port Townsend in an effort to locate a site that could support the needs of the hospital. He landed on the fairgrounds, where the hospital invested in renovating the kitchen and where Stark and his staff would prepare all the food eaten by staff and patients for two years.
While the fairgrounds’ zoning allows for no commercial uses, running a nonprofit school out of the location was aligned with its permitted activities.
Stark expects the school to run two or three days a week after school starting in 2026, with the possibility of a summer camp. While he feels confident in his ability to teach that schedule, he doesn’t want to teach more than one day week. His hope is to bring in other skilled chefs and cooks as teachers and to teach teachers, he said.
“I’ve got my short list,” Stark said. “People are coming to me saying, ‘Hey, I used to teach cooking classes down in San Francisco. I will come teach cooking classes here.’”
Gabriel Schuenemann, chef and co-owner of Alderwood Bistro in Sequim, will be an early teacher, Stark said. A number of cooks from Jefferson Healthcare may join in as well, he added.
The kitchen also will house a massive cookbook collection Stark has amassed over the years.
Costs for classes have yet to be determined, although Stark noted affordability is a guiding principle.
“I need to cover the cost of the food and facility costs, but the hope is affordability, with a kind of Robin Hood model,” Stark said.
Stark said he is considering charging higher rates to adults who are seeking to expand their skill set, so he can charge less to kids.
Stark also hopes to build a culinary volunteer corps to provide catering to other nonprofits, as a means to generate revenue for facility costs, to pay teachers and for scholarships.
Wednesday night’s methods class was a thorough overview of vegetables: Their families, safe knife skills, chopping techniques, oven-roasting and preparing on a stove top.
At one point in his presentation, Stark referenced “Boiling Point,” a documentary series depicting Chef Gordon Ramsay at his most volatile. Stark, by contrast, is a ham — and he describes himself as such.
He ran back and forth from the prep table to the convection oven, checking to see if his quarter-sized trays of roasting vegetables were al dente. After retrieving the veggies, he ran — huffing and puffing — back to the class, where he made a show of testing the consistency with his teeth.
Once, when he went to check the vegetables by eye, his glasses fogged up.
Further entertainment value was found in the many voices and accents Stark employed as he moved through his demonstration.
At one point, while describing the uses of a tomato, Stark moved fluidly from a French, to an English to a Southern American accent within the span of mere sentences.
When asked about the voices, Stark said he grew up in Atlanta and spent part of his childhood in England. French and German accents were gained from experience working in kitchens with chefs from those counties.
When he was 18, Stark did an apprenticeship in Atlanta at the American Culinary Federation, where he worked under Chef Wolfgang Gropp.
His career saw him cooking in fine-dining restaurants in Atlanta and the surrounding area, then in Boston, the Berkshires, Florida and Portland, before he moved to Port Townsend.
The remaining lectures, “Everything Salmon” and “The Chicken,” will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 10 and Dec. 17, respectively. Both classes will include demonstrations of butchering, cooking methods and sauces. The chicken class will include a lesson on stocks.
Attendance costs $33.39 including fees and includes a sample of the food prepared during the demonstration. Tickets can be purchased at tinyurl.com/44r3crmw.
Donations can be made to the kitchen by contacting Mishko at director@jeffcofairgrounds.org, by mailing a check with a note specifying the desired use or by stopping by the fairgrounds in person.
The fairgrounds website also is planned to provide a kitchen-specific donation option, Mishko said.
________
Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
