table talk / By Bob Doran

In the Night Kitchen

(Feb. 22, 2007)  It’s hard to miss the Community Kitchen at the new Eureka Co-op - just look at the back of the store for the giant capital letters spelling KITCHEN, and the slightly smaller “cooking demonstrations.”

So far the room has mostly been used for meetings, everything from dental hygienists and Boy Scouts to the Co-op board of directors. Product demos are actually out in the store, so the cooking demonstrations part is a bit of a misnomer. Stephanie Phelps, who runs the kitchen, sees the series of cooking classes that started last week as fulfilling that role.

Eureka Co-op’s Community Kitchen

GALLERY >

On a Thursday evening around suppertime the roll-up window into the kitchen is open. Chef Alex Begovic, a Frenchman who is usually found running the kitchen at Jambalaya, is getting ready for his first class in the new space. While frying bacon and reducing a pot of red wine for one of the dishes he’ll cook later, he opens cupboards, pulling out utensils and pans, learning where the tools are and arranging them for the coming session. A wooden table, more or less a large cutting board on wheels, serves as his prep area; it’s littered with an assortment of herbs and vegetables, a pile of cubed lamb, bowls of this and that.

Stephanie, who will serve as his assistant for the class, is at the sink readying dishes and silverware. She came to the Co-op from Pacific Flavors, the recently closed Old Town kitchenware store, where she’d worked for about a year helping coordinate their well-attended series of cooking classes. For the most part the Co-op has replicated the P.F. model, hiring many of the cooks who taught there, Alex among them.

My old friend Henry Robertson, of Henry’s Olives fame, is another veteran of the P.F.C. School, same with Betty Thompson (who, BTW, wrote a cooking column for the Journal years ago). Other instructors include Maria Levy, who grew up in the Philippines and now runs Ms. M’s catering, Bryan Hopper sous-chef at Hotel Carter’s Restaurant 301, and Leigh Blakemore from the College of the Redwoods culinary program, all of them P.F.C. vets.

The night I attended Alex’s class, a majority of the half dozen students had taken classes at Pacific Flavors. Some spoke of the existence of “Alex groupies” and noted that Henry in particular had a strong following. It was easy to see how Alex would inspire repeat students: He has a casual, easygoing way about him, eschewing the more formal chef coat he typically wears at the Jambalaya for a loose blue T-shirt. His way of explaining things was equally casual. He noted, for example, as he showed how to make crostini, that “it’s just a swanky, pseudo-French/Italian word for toast.”

Then there’s the accent. While he’s been in the states for a long time, he still talks like someone raised in the Loire Valley. That area was the source for the dishes he prepared for his first class at the Co-op, “French Country Foods.”

The menu: Soup a l’onion (French onion soup), eggs poached in red wine with braised winter greens, bacon, croutons and a pomegranate vinaigrette, country lamb stew, and pears poached in red wine with a ginger caramel sauce, not necessarily in that order.

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