Cooking school in Des Moines Social Club opens

It's hard to shake Zachary Mannheimer loose from an idea once he's got his heart set on it. Maybe that's just plain old stubbornness or maybe it's true vision, the ability to see a sweet spot down the road that most of us can't. (Although, it's worth noting that one of Mannheimer's visions — to have a zipline connecting the main building to the building that houses the theater — did not make the final cut.)

Whatever it is, it's how the Des Moines Social Club grew from an orphaned oddball toddler wandering the edges of the downtown playground into the happening-est millennial hipster. The city now claims it as its own proud-making adopted son.

It's also how today, March 29, the Social Club is able to introduce its own beloved offspring: the Social Club's Culinary Loft cooking school and event space. The loft's coming-out party will rage today from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. — or until a whole, roasted hog is gone — at the Social Club downtown.

The official moniker is "Culinary Loft presented by Meredith Corporation and Cathy and Steve Lacy," and is the Des Moines Social Club's latest addition to its varied programming — which ranges from aerial classes to theater productions to yoga.

The beginning

The idea for the loft first took root in the fertile minds of Paul Rottenberg and George Formaro of Orchestrate Hospitality, which owns Malo on the club's first floor. They eventually decided not to take it on. "But once a culinary school had been mentioned, I had to have it," said Mannheimer, the founder and executive director of the club.

"The culinary arts get the shaft in most arts programs," Mannheimer said. "I wanted a real program that paid homage to the art of cooking for it to be recognized as a true art form."

The culinary school dream started to become a reality last summer, just months after DMSC opened, when a crack advance team of Mannheimer; Kitchen Collage owner Teresa Adams-Tomka; Des Moines super-booster Chris Diebel; and loft sponsor Cathy Lacy got together and just made it happen, raising $360,000 in a matter of months. Construction started in January.

And so it exists. It exists because of that small group of worker bees and a short but mighty list of donors and because of Mannheimer's stubbornness. Or vision.

Building a kitchen

While gathering string (and those dollars) for the project, DMSC has been offering the space for rent since the club opened last spring. Mannheimer said the demand for rental space surprised him and the space has already hosted weddings, showers and all kinds of parties. When it came time to plan the school, the design took that into account, and the loft can easily transform from a cooking class to wedding reception.

"It is designed first and foremost as a culinary school," Mannheimer said, "and 80 percent of the time that's what it will be. The other 20 percent will be for rentals; we can do a sit-down dinner for 100 in here." The club is already booking the space into 2017. Now that the physical space is ready to welcome the community, Mannheimer and his culinary cadre hope the community will take advantage of it.

Class offerings include "six-ingredient date night" (bring three ingredients, get assigned three mystery ingredients and start cooking); The Cheese Shop series; knife skills classes; Culinary 101; a series sponsored by UnityPoint Health called Farmers' Market Shop and Cook (gather a list of ingredients at the market, head to the loft and cook yourself a meal); and lots of others. The list of future classes is long and diverse.

Adams-Tomka is a fan of the concept. "I hope more people will embrace time in the kitchen," Adams-Tomka said. "So many people consider it a chore."

She and her East Village store Kitchen Collage will be a retail partner with the loft, which means not only that Adams-Tomka will have inventory available for purchase at the Culinary Loft's classes but also that she and her vendors helped fill the kitchen with donated and discounted items.

The back-of-house area in the loft is stacked with the fruits of Adams-Tomka's labor and is every home cook's dream: commercial-grade pots and induction burners and stacks of colorful Le Creuset pans, dishes and gadgets. The classroom space itself has a cool, industrial look with rolling stainless tables that raise and lower. Each table can sit up to 4 to 8 people; eight can sit at the counter. There is a six-burner cooktop and a double industrial oven. A camera pointed at the cooking area feeds two big-screen televisions facing the classroom.

The most expensive feature in the kitchen will probably go largely unnoticed, or so everyone involved hopes. The windows, which look over the Ninth Street viaduct and curve around the whole outside of the room, are a historic feature that were verboten to change. They were also a very and noisy and cold feature until DMSC got permission to add a layer of windows inside the room, leaving the original windows visible and intact.

Finding a leader

The Culinary Loft will host its first real class — breakfast and yoga — on April 4 and, many other classes are already listed on the club's web site. The Culinary Loft's director, Amanda Mae Phillips, 30, just started a few weeks ago and was thrown immediately into the deep end of the pool. Luckily she's quite the swimmer, and her ideas run as deep as that bracing pool entrance.

Phillips, 30, went to the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont after getting a degree in photography from Kansas State.

After graduating from NECI in 2009, she worked in restaurants in Kansas City (her hometown), Colorado and St. Louis. She landed at Whole Foods as a kitchen manager, and when the West Des Moines Whole Foods store was opening in 2012, Phillips did some research on Iowa. One good read sealed the deal. "I read an article in Saveur magazine about breaded pork tenderloins and figured it was kismet."

Sold on the state's great culinary scene (and the idea of also having access to a red velvet funnel cake), she moved to Iowa to run the West Des Moines store's bakery and prepared food areas before taking the position at the Social Club that she calls her dream job.

The creativity of the opportunity beckoned; the chance to study and teach what strikes her fancy was too good to pass up. "Being a line cook is very intense. And I've always wanted to work with the theory and history and the science of food. I'm interested in the anthropology of food."

Despite her mission to lead many of the class offerings, Phillips is clear that her goal is to be mostly back-of-house. "So much of what I've been doing is getting others in here to show off all the cool stuff people in Des Moines are doing. I don't need to be the face of it; I just want to support the experts."

Teamwork

Diebel, a public relations professional, said the project came together surprisingly easily. "It has been one of the more rewarding nonprofit groups I've worked with," Diebel said. "... People not only contributed financially, they got involved."

Cathy Lacy got volunteered (willingly) by her husband — Steve Lacy, Meredith Corp.'s CEO and president — after Mannheimer approached him for financial support. Meredith Corporation and the Lacys are the culinary loft's largest donors (the "presenting sponsors"). Other sponsors are MidAmerican Energy, Orchestrate Hospitality, the Polk County Board of Supervisors, Kitchen Collage and La Quercia.

Cathy Lacy is a registered dietitian, food lover and cook, and she was happy to get involved. "I loved the idea! Kitchens are a great place to learn, and they're the place where people like to hang out," Cathy Lacy said. "We get asked for a lot of things, but this is different and exciting for me."

All the players in the development of the Culinary Loft agree that the space is for everyone. Kids, home cooks, optimistic noncooks, people interested in healthful cooking and eating, wine lovers.

"There's a perception that the Social Club is only for YPs and hipsters," Chris Diebel said. "This is an example that's not true."

Mannheimer and Phillips also hope area chefs will make the Culinary Loft their own. "We want chefs to treat this as their experimental space and in three or four years, I would love it if in three or four years we were considered the downtown culinary campus for DMACC's and Central Campus' culinary programs."

Nothing's set in stone, but it would be unwise to bet against that happening. Kiboshed zipline notwithstanding, Mannheimer has proved his tenacity when it comes to things he sets his heart on. (Related: Be on the lookout for a human version of the Hungry Hungry Hippos game to show up at DMSC.)

And he's always looking ahead to that spot most of us don't see yet.

The Great Pig Out

The Des Moines Social Club will welcome the community to its newest space, the Culinary Loft presented by Meredith Corporation and Cathy and Steve Lacy, today, March 29. The Great Pig Out will be from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at DMSC, 900 Mulberry St. Tickets are available at the door and are $20 per person. Chef and Culinary Loft director Amanda Mae Phillips will be roasting a 200-pound hog in the courtyard and guests can eat until its gone.

Besides 200 pounds of roasted pig and side dishes provided by Maytag, tickets include beer samples, treats from Creme Cupcake + Dessert and the first look at the new culinary school and event space. Music will be provided by Jewel City Sound.