Cooking Class at Leiths in Hammersmith

The idea of spending a morning picking up some culinary expertise at Leiths, one of the capital’s big name cookery schools, was a very attractive one. In reality, however, the experience fell far short of my expectations. Was I hoping for too much?

Hospitality in general is about attention to detail, about presenting a business to the public in the best possible light. I was predisposed to like Leiths, and already owned one of their cook books before I visited, but arriving to a canteen full of people, left to sit unwelcomed on a broken chair, my first impressions were bad.

On having to go and collect an unpersonalised printout from behind the serving counter myself, it speaks volumes that, following a nasty hunch, I checked what tea and coffee they were serving. And there it was, on full display: a thunking great catering sized tin of Nescafe. I could not believe my eyes. Why on earth anyone would leave that lying around a cookery school is quite beyond me. To serve it is bad enough, to display it seems suicidally sloppy. Bad start.

Looking through the disordered printout, not even presented in a uniform font, I saw that the recipes were in fact exact copies from the very cookbook that I own. This would not have been bad thing if they were brought to life in some way, but we were taken up to the kitchen where a chef read hesitantly through the instructions on the handout for a few minutes, looking at it for the first time I suspect, and then sent off in pairs to get on with it. The kitchens are nice, the ingredients were good, but if I wanted to follow a recipe then I could have done that at home.

My real objection is that, as with any teaching process, it is necessary to model and give feedback. At Leiths we were told, not shown, what to do and there was precious little correction going on: I saw numerous pans with burnt garlic, there was no tasting of what people were making, and no advice on presentation. If I had arrived unable to cook, I would certainly not have left much the wiser, and this is unquestionably the school’s raison d’être. In addition, the set-up means that some things are done for you, others not – ‘it’s all very confusing’, as my partner noted, shortly before we set fire to a pan of sugar syrup. I left with a couple of tips but nothing of real significance.

Although one of the younger chefs was very helpful and friendly, and there was a nice conviviality amongst the groups, at £105 for a morning I would expect more, much more. Must try harder.

Leiths School of Food and Wine Limited
16-20 Wendell Road
Hammersmith
W12 9RT

Tel: 020 8749 6400