The Dirty Apron - Cooking Classes

A Vancouver Date Idea

What We Loved

A bit of friendly competition, learning something new and making something you both can enjoy and eat together.

Insider Tip

Book well ahead of time - classes tend to fill up quick - especially the popular ones.

Our Date Experience

First of all, a cooking class is not just a great date idea, its excellent way to find out your partners cooking abilities before you sentence your self to starving in your relationship. But on a more serious note, it was one of my favourite dates and I really enjoyed the process of learning how to make restaurant worthy dishes.

We had the class booked at the Dirty Apron cooking school and were very impressed with how well everything was organized and coordinated. We arrived in advance and were greeted with some freshly baked bread from their own bakery and a glass of champaign. We were also given aprons with name tag stickers and got a tour around the kitchen. The kitchen was very clean and well stocked for what we were planning to do. We all had separate stations with our own stove, oven and sink. We also got all the ingredients ready and portioned on our stations. After a shortchanged intro by the master chef and his cooking instructions, we got to our stations to start making the appetizer. A fancy lobster salad was on the menu that day so we got a live lobster staring at us from the station. How exciting.., or not. Once we murdered the poor lobster, the salad making began. It was dun and promoted a lot of teamwork, we were both very excited.

After the first course was finished we took our fancy looking dished to the dining room and had the salad with a glass of wine. Once everyone was done we returned to the kitchen and were instructed on how to prepare the main course, each was Salt Steamed Dorado. We learned a cool prep technique, which involved mixing lots of egg whites with salt and covering our fish with the mixture, which then crusted in the oven and resulted in the most tender fish we ever tried. Happy with our cooking skills we enjoyed another glass of wine with our main dish and returned to the kitchen to make dessert.

This was a long and exciting experience, we especially loved all the wine between the courses and great recipes.

Simply put, this was one of the best interactive date experiences I had. Not to say that I haven’t been to Paris or engaged in other fun romantic activities... 😉 ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

One of the biggest downsides of online dating in our day and age is certainly the inability to learn more about your date in action. You get to read their profile, exchange a few txt messages and then head for an initial interview like dinner or drink. But how about learning about them from what they do rather than say? To me words are nothing and actions are everything so I found the coking class experience to be incredibly valuable when it comes to getting to know your potential partner. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Here what I learned that night: ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

He is pretty good at killing poor lobsters 🦞
I seem to lose my cooking skills after the second glass of wine 🍷🤦‍♀️
I’m leading in the kitchen, but he surprisingly knows what to do and would do just fine without me 😅
I’m a bit of a control freak when it’s comes to food presentation (and sometimes beyond that, haha) but he doesn’t seem to mind 🙃
We work well together and most importantly we have fun!

Cooking can most certainly be an intimidating activity for some men. Not everyone is good at it and there's all sorts of confusing lingo you need to understand. Fortunately, the Dirty Apron makes cooking fancy meals seem easy, and if you're not super confident don't worry there's booze to help you through it!

Our night at the Dirty Apron was a memorable date night and one I'm eagerly looking forward to doing again! P showed me up by fileting the fish properly but she still needs me to do the dirty deed when it comes to lobster cooking.

When booking at the dirty apron there are alot of different classes - if you want to make a date night out of it make sure to choose the couples classes. The price may seem steep at first, but given you get a three course meal, wine and a night out it's fairly cheap considering the experience!

@vancitydateideas