Mother-daughter duo celebrates 10 years of CRATE
Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
Jen Clark and her mother, Dorothy Vaccarello, have owned and operated CRATE Cooking School for one decade this year. Clark enjoys hosting events and teaching classes, and believes everyone who loves cooking should invest in a good knife.
Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
If Jen Clark were stranded on an island, the CRATE cooking instructor said she would take olive oil, salt and pepper. “I am a firm believer in just salt and pepper. You can roast vegetables just in olive oil, salt and pepper and get this most amazing flavor from the heat of the oven,” said Clark, who owns and operates CRATE with her mother, Dorothy Vaccarello.
Photos: Courtesy of Jen Clark
Jen Clark, right, and her mother, Dorothy Vaccarello ,have owned and operated CRATE in Green Tree for 10 years. The mother-daughter duo took classes for years at CRATE before purchasing the business from its previous owner upon her retirement.
Courtesy of Jen Clark
To celebrate one decade of owning CRATE, Jen Clark, left, and her mother Dorothy Vaccarello hosted an anniversary party at the storefront in Green Tree. Clarence Butler drew caricatures of attendees, including, from center left, Chef Rachel Homan, Susan Scott and Chris Novak.
Jen Clark grew up in her mother’s kitchen.
“My mom has always been an amazing cook,” said Clark, leaning against the festive high bar inside CRATE Cooking School. “We would cook together all the time. My favorite memories are food memories. I have a lot of memories of eating and being in the kitchen with her and enjoying food.”
Clark and her mother, Dorothy Vaccarello, prepared Thanksgiving feasts and enjoyed experimenting with different textures and flavors. Though Clark loved helping her mom measure and mix and sauté and bake, it wasn’t until she was in her mid-20s that the South Fayette native really got into food.
“I didn’t get into cooking as much until I was out of college. We just really started spending time in the kitchen together as I was, you know, a little bit older and could appreciate it.”
The mother-daughter duo registered for cooking classes at CRATE in Greene Tree. Those classes brought Clark and Vaccarello closer as they honed their culinary chops.
“We would just really enjoy the classes together and love the atmosphere and everything about it,” said Clark.
In 2011, CRATE’s owner announced her forthcoming retirement and expressed a desire for one of her students to take over the business.
“My mom and I joked about it and then, we did it,” said Clark, with a smile. “June 26, 2012, was the day that we took over.”
Over the last decade, some things have changed, but Clark and Vaccarello remain true to CRATE’s original business model. CRATE is a retail store that offers top-quality kitchen ware, and its heartbeat is the cooking demonstrations and classes hosted by the region and nation’s most brilliant chefs.
Among the instructors on CRATE’s rotation are Loretta Paganini, who owns The Loretta Paganini School of Cooking in Cleveland, and John Reicherter, executive chef at The Porch at Siena in South Hills.
Clark, too, leads cooking classes inside her spacious industrial kitchen.
“I’m not, like, professionally trained in culinary. I always tell people I’m mom-taught and CRATE-taught,” laughed the foodie. “Classes here were taught by some of the best chefs in the area. The first three years of owning the business, I was just running the business. I wasn’t teaching right off the bat. I … moved into that, and just getting the training from different instructors and kind of absorbing it all in like a sponge, it was really good hands-on education.”
That hands-on education is enjoyed by corporations looking for a different kind of team-building activity and friends searching for a unique girls night out. Clark also offers private cooking classes perfect for date nights, bachelorette and bridal parties, and birthday parties.
“Wednesday afternoons, we do what we call lunch and learn classes. They’re demonstration-style, so you sit in here and you watch and you learn and then you get served the full meal,” Clark said. “There’s a group of people that started doing this and have become friends from it. They email each other about which classes they’re going to sign up for. There’s a good group of regulars.”
CRATE also hosts an annual kids summer food camp, where kids learn to make foods from around the world. That camp and the regular kids cooking classes are some of Clark’s favorite events.
She and her mother also love hosting local culinary tours.
“Our tours of the Strip are really, really popular. We just show our favorite places to shop. Even people that have lived here forever, that frequent the Strip District, they might not have known about one of the places we go. Or maybe they never took the time to look in a specific corner of a specific store,” Clark said.
The mother-daughter partnership blends the pair’s passions and expertise. Clark, who has experience in marketing and event coordination, plans programs and runs CRATE’s social media, while Vaccarello, whose background is in accounting, helps with the business side of things.
“It all kind of fits,” Clark laughed. “My mom and I are, like, best friends, so it’s nice. It doesn’t really feel like work.”
Their decade of CRATE ownership doesn’t really feel like 10 years, either.
“I’m going through this reel in my mind of the last 10 years. There’s a lot of good (moments),” Clark said. “We used to have people from different states come in. If there was a cookbook author that was promoting something, they’d call and come in and that’s kind of been different over the last couple of years.”
The last couple years have been Clark and Vaccarello’s most challenging, because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re not just a retail sore, we’re not a restaurant. We’re a cooking school,” said Clark, noting she and her mother struggled to navigate the shifting COVID-19 protocols.
“We made it through,” she said, “and there’s so many people that didn’t.”
The pair’s adaptability has helped them not just survive, but thrive. When COVID began, they started offering virtual cooking classes (Clark said during one birthday party event, she taught folks in Pennysylvania, Hawaii and Europe), and shifted store hours to better accommodate customers.
In July, Clark and Vaccarello threw a CRATE celebration, and caricaturist Clarence Butler was on-site to commemorate the occasion (he’s also the business’ in-house graphic designer).
“The time went so quickly. One thing about it being 10 years: I mentioned that to the kids in the kids class. I said, ‘a decade’ and they’re like, ‘You’re 100?’ I was like, ‘No, that’s a century.’ I thought that was one of the funniest things,” Clark said.
In the next 10 years, Clark plans to grow CRATE’s classes and private events. She’d like to expand her culinary knowledge – perhaps visit Europe and bring authentic recipes and techniques back to Southwestern Pennsylvania – and continue hosting local tours.
And, of course, she’ll keep curating menus with Vaccarello and the pair’s cooking class instructors, and leading classes at CRATE. Clark loves teaching.
“Looking back, when we first started coming here, I would have never thought that it would be ours, that we would be putting our own stamp on the business,” Clark said. “In the next 10 years, I hope I’m still doing this. I hope I’m still enjoying what I do. It doesn’t really feel like work. It’s just like (my mom) and I are talking about food and don’t really get sick of it. I feel very lucky to have (CRATE) as a part of my life.”