“I’ve been a corporate chef, a country club chef, and a restaurant chef,” says Chef Jonathan Kraft, “and at this point, I want to do it my way.”
His way is to turn part of the expansive, two-story Art Dimensions digs in the heart of West Cherokee Street’s burgeoning “fun district” into a cooking school, with open-ended plans for a café, catering business, sales of barbecue fare, and whatever other food-related ideas float his boat and earn attention from the restaurant-going public, he said.
The first brick in the empire, Taste Central Cooking School will open for business on June 3. That’s when Kraft, serving as the school’s Culinary Director, plans to begin offering courses scheduled on demand, in such areas as “Cooking Seafood: Grilling, Sautéeing, and Classic Sauces”; “BBQ Master: Brines, Dry Rubs, Marinades, and Slow Cookin’"; and “The Summer Vegetarian: Fresh Produce, Grains, and Legumes for Balanced Nutrition.” The classes, designed for groups of a dozen students, will offer demonstrations of three courses, with optional wine pairings. He plans to teach many of them himself, eventually involving friends from the local pool of chef talent. (“Eric Brenner [of Robust Catering] is one of my friends and catering associates,” he said, “and I’ll be cooking with my friend Tim Grandinetti of Overlook Farm on June 6 at a St. Louis Magazine event [Food. Wine. Design] ”)
Kraft goes way back with the Art Dimensions crew. He’s been their go-to food guy through a peripatetic journey that has seen the art gallery/umbrella group through many locations and adventures, including the annual Taste of St. Louis festival, which they were instrumental in reviving. Kraft created the popular Taste of St. Louis culinary competitions, and was also the host of the “Taste Central” TV show, which ran briefly on local-access cable. He was also involved in Taste magazine, a short-lived insert in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Art Dimensions has always been about thinking big, and in that spirit, Kraft is already envisioning much more than those cooking classes at the 2720 Cherokee Street space.
“The classes will be on the second floor,” he said, “with a huge window next to the space, facing the street. It would make a great café. And there’s a new patio behind the building that will be great for barbecuing and vending barbecue during events. We have a kickass Backwoods Smoker.”
“And my friends and I are looking at other places on Cherokee, too,” he added. “I think the area needs a diner and some ethnic places, maybe a sushi bar. The sky’s the limit – with the way things are going on Cherokee Street, it could the new [U. City] Loop.”
Kraft’s resume leads one to believe that his part in the Cherokee Street renaissance will not be negligible. He has more than 25 years of food-service experience at museums, country clubs, resorts, hotels, universities, corporations, and restaurants from the Harvard Business School Dean’s House to the Ritz Carlton Jockey Club in NYC to Wolfgang Puck’s operation at the St. Louis Art Museum. He’s a Certified Executive Chef (CEC) of the American Culinary Federation as well as the Chaine des Rotisseurs International Gourmet Society, and was voted Chef of the Year by the St. Louis Chefs de Cuisine in 2002. In 2004, he competed at the high-pressure International Culinary Olympics (IKA) in Erfurt, Germany, and locally, he’s taught culinary classes at St. Louis Community College-Forest Park and the Dierbergs School of Cooking.
To schedule a class, contact Chef Kraft at 314-359-9365 or jkraftcec@gmail.com
Kraft photo courtesy of stlcore.com
