“I think it’s really important to experience the class from the students perspective and it’s only that way that you can make your service offerings better.” Barbara Dawson, Owner of In Good Taste is passionate about great cuisine, quality ingredients, supporting her community and making sure her customers come away with a unique, lasting experience. This spirited focus has made In Good Taste one of Portland’s longest running premier culinary classes and gourmet store. I spent some time with Barbara in her Pearl District location to get to know her background and the origins of In Good Taste.
Tell me about In Good Taste. We are primarily a cooking school for non-professional people. So we don’t train professional chefs. And then we have the retail store that supports the classes. We’ve found that when people take a class, they get excited about going home and cooking some of the meals they learned about immediately. And so we have items here that support the cooking classes. For instance if we do a sushi class, we have books on sushi preparation – for customers to learn more about the techniques. Also, we have knives, pots and pans and things that support cooking, but don’t carry plates or dinnerware as there are lots of places that do a good job of selling those items.
What was your personal journey to opening In Good Taste? I was originally in high-tech. I used to work for Intel. But I was always passionate about cooking – loved to do it and every time I took a vacation or sabbatical, I would spend it in cooking schools around the world. And I loved them. At the time, the only cooking school in Portland was In Good Taste – of which I took classes. So when I retired from Intel, I met with the manager to see if they needed investors and it turned out they were looking to sell. So we bought it.
What are some of things that you are doing differently? We made quite a few changes. Initially, we kind of kept it the way it was. There was a bistro here that served lunches and we maintained that for a while, but realized, it wasn’t what we were about. We really wanted to be a cooking school. We also did catering which was a good part of the business, but once again we decided that was a distraction and we wanted to focus on the cooking school. The other thing is that when we first bought this, the way cooking classes were conducted typically was where the chef stands up and teaches. One change we brought in was to actually let the students participate in making the meal themselves.
Was more student participation something that you had always desired? Yes. I’ve been to cooking classes all over the world and noticed that there were two styles. One was this demonstration where the chef does everything and you sit back, sip wine. It’s a great way to go but the other way was like in France where we went into the kitchen and we cooked the meal and it was a lot of fun. So we started doing that after we bought the business and that’s a fairly big part of the classes we offer now.
So how do you go about selecting the merchandise? It’s all hand-picked. Our retail manager does most of the buying. I do some of it – like the cookbooks and the wine. But we’re guided by what we do in the cooking schools. For instance, we don’t offer a lot of diet classes, so we don’t have a lot of diet books. Whatever our chefs are excited about – tell us about products they really love – if we like it, we’ll bring it in. We don’t carry things we don’t believe in or our chefs don’t use.
How do you go about marketing your business? Everything from understanding who your target audience is to getting the message out? You know, it’s interesting because when we started - which was 10 years ago – our customers were just so passionate about food so it was easy to identify them. Now we’re getting people from a much broader spectrum. And that’s actually been a little bit of a challenge because we have come to realize that not everybody knows how to cook when they come here. So we can’t take things for granted. There’s a lot of people now for instance in this economy that are learning to cook for the first time. And they’re only doing it because they don’t’ want to eat out every night – they can’t afford to. But they want to learn to cook because they want to continue to eat the kinds of food they’ve had. We definitely do have different customer segments. One is the people who love food and love to cook and love to entertain. One thing about the set-up we have here is that we keep it small so it’s almost like having a dinner party. But then we have the other people that are learning to cook because they need to learn the basics. Then we also have some corporate customers. They buy a cooking class as a team-building event or as entertainment for their clients.
Are you finding people wanting to be more adventurous in the types of cuisine they want to learn about? Yes – definitely. Over the years our customer base has evolved in a couple of ways. Those that I mentioned earlier, but also, we used to have almost exclusively women as customers. But that has changed completely and its wonderful to see men – some who have never cooked before – really get into it, get hands on in learning the techniques. Overall, our customers tend to be more adventurous in their eating. Just in general, the Portland food scene has changed so much in the last 10 years – getting ethnic. So some of our most popular classes are things like sushi, Thai cooking , Indian style – we do a lot of Asian style classes.
Do you take part in the classes yourself sometimes to scratch your own itch to learn and also for some quality control? Yes – that’s actually a good question and one that most people don’t think about. First of all I don’t teach any classes because I’m not a trained culinary professional. But I do attend classes. One, so that I can learn new things and I’m constantly trying to keep ahead of new trends in cooking. But also I think its really important to experience the class from the students perspective and its only that way that you can make your service offerings better. The day you stop taking one of your classes will be really a bad day.
That’s a good philosophy to have. Yes, it’s really important. I really believe that. We have two locations. The Lake Oswego location is like one big kitchen. We only do hands on cooking classes there and that’s the one that I don’t get to be there as often but my husband is there quite a bit. So between the two of us we keep an eye on everything.
Anything else you’d like to share about In Good Taste? What’s important to us is to support our local community. We love the area – it’s so vibrant and energetic. But it’s also really important to us to have local foods. Food that is fresh and sourced as locally as possible. We’ve done that for years. It’s an important part of who we are and what we do. It’s another reason why people come back again and again. The food tastes good and it’s important for us to let people know they don’t have to spend hours and hours slaving in the kitchen to get a good tasting meal.
