The Star spoke to Wendy O'Brien, the head chef at Blend Culinary Foundation (BCF), based at Cambridge Street Collective, to find out more about their cooking classes.
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00:00Everybody loves our classes and we have classes, we have our masterclasses and
00:06they're very popular. Our cooking and cocktails season we've done a summer,
00:13we're on our autumn and then we're going to host Christmas and winter and they
00:17are always sold out within a week beforehand so we have 18 people in here
00:22and they're all learning something fun and having cocktails and yeah it's a
00:28really really popular class. People always think that it's going to be a
00:32really complicated thing to make and then they're always astounded at how
00:35simple it is to make it yourself. So that makes me happy to know that somebody's
00:41going to go home and actually make that at home, it's not just a one-off, they're
00:45going to think right I'm going to make that now, so that's quite cool.
00:48For you, you've been involved with Cambridge Street since it opened I
00:53believe and your background is as a chef, so how does it feel for you or
00:58what was it that drew you into joining this? Well as a chef you spend all
01:05your life cooking for people who can afford to eat out at fancy restaurants. I
01:10trained at Le Gavroche in London which was the first three mission and star
01:15restaurant in England and people generally can't afford to eat in some of
01:21these restaurants but when you think about people who actually can't afford
01:25to eat, period, that's it, they're struggling, they can't feed their
01:30children and as a chef it's a great job, you're giving people pleasure but you
01:37you don't give back to the community, you don't really help
01:41anyone and it was just a way to be a chef and to also have the joy of
01:47actually helping people who really really need it and there's so many
01:51people out there that are living on the breadline and you know to be in a
01:56country like this and and realize that there are people on our doorstep who are
02:00starving, it's quite an upsetting thought to be fair, so yeah it was a no-brainer
02:05I absolutely love the idea of being able to do something, to do cookery classes
02:10but then in the same vein to do classes for people who actually otherwise would
02:15never be able to afford to do something like that and to get them in to do it
02:19for free, yeah it's just it's a lot of joy.