The 'Authentic Cooking Class' Is a Confession

The word authentic in the class name is doing a lot of work. It's working overtime. Because if the experience were actually authentic, they wouldn't need to say so.

Here's what $120 buys you in Chiang Mai or Tuscany: a guided walk through a market curated for tourists, forty minutes of someone explaining what cilantro is, and two hours touching dough in a kitchen that exists for the purpose of you touching dough. The person leading it is not a cook. They're a tour operator with a mortar and pestle. The pad thai you make will be worse than the pad thai at the cart you walked past on the way there. The cart costs 60 baht. The class costs 3,800 baht. This is not a coincidence. The cooking class industry runs on one insight: people will pay a lot of money to feel like they're not tourists while being tourists.

I've done three of these. I did one in Hoi An, one outside Florence, one in Oaxaca where I thought maybe it'd be different. It was not different. The only cooking class that has ever taught me anything was watching a woman named Siriporn make a curry in a doorway off Th Charoen Krung and asking her, badly, what she just added. She said something I didn't understand. I ate the curry. That's it. That's the whole class.