We arrive at Shandra Woworuntu’s home in Queens, New York, on a Sunday afternoon, six strangers on another stranger’s doorstep, buzzing with nervous excitement. At 1 p.m. sharp, the door cracks open to reveal a shy teenage boy with scruffy black hair, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He ushers us inside. We slip off our shoes and make small talk in the hall. Then a woman’s—undoubtedly a mother’s—shrill command from somewhere above us summons our greeter upstairs—something about guests and chairs. As he bounds away, we exchange glances and chuckles. We know we’re in for something special.
We’ve come for a cooking class—but no starchy chef’s whites nor gleaming industrial stovetops await us here. Woworuntu is a proud member of the League of Kitchens, a cooking school unlike any other: Its instructors are immigrant grandmothers and mothers from around the world; its classrooms are the instructors’ homes across New York. Students can venture to Staten Island to learn Lebanese cooking; Brooklyn to break into Bangladeshi; and here, Queens, to indulge in Indonesian. Live online classes let home cooks around the world visit from afar.
Lisa Kyung Gross, who founded the school in 2014, was intentional about both the teachers and the setting.
The daughter of a Hungarian Jewish New Yorker father and Korean immigrant mother, Gross grew up eating traditional Korean dishes her grandmother cooked from scratch. But whenever she tried to help in the kitchen, she was shooed away by many a well-meaning immigrant parent’s refrain: “Don’t worry about cooking. Studying is more important,” her grandmother said.
She died before Gross could ask for her recipes.
Gross dreamt of finding another Korean grandmother to cook with in her home, to learn her family recipes—but then she thought, why stop at Korean?
She found two immigrant women, from Lebanon and Bangladesh, to teach cooking classes on their traditional cuisines. She envisioned an experience “that was not only about amazing cooking and eating, but also about creating an opportunity for meaningful cross-cultural learning, connection, and exchange,” she said.
She knew that she wanted her teachers to be home cooks, not restaurant chefs, because “in most places around the world, the fullest expression of a cuisine isn’t in a restaurant—it’s in the home,” she said. “Most culinary traditions have been oral traditions passed down between women in the home.”
She also wanted the classes to be held in those most intimate spaces. “When you see their cooking tools and how they store their spices, and you’re eating the food on their traditional dishware, being taught how you eat it, it’s such a deeper cultural experience,” she said.
For Gross, who’d felt disconnected from her own heritage, “it felt healing,” she said.
Kitchen Ambassadors
A decade in, the League of Kitchens has 14 instructors, from Argentinian to Uzbek. Gross’s requirements are rigorous. She estimates she’s interviewed 300 to 400 people and done 75 in-home cooking auditions to find their winning team.
“We’re really looking for people who are not only good home cooks, but exceptional home cooks,” she said. These are women who are known in their communities for their food, who “can cook for 40 people with their eyes closed,” and who possess deep knowledge of their traditional cuisine.
They are also, importantly, warm and dynamic teachers and hosts, passionate about sharing their stories with others.
I discover as much as we walk up the stairs of Woworuntu’s home and finally meet our host—as vibrant as the dazzling, multi-colored spread of food she’s already prepared. A “snack,” she says of the veritable meal, giggling.
Woworuntu is bubbly and high-spirited, punctuating most sentences with a joyful cackle of a laugh. She’s excited to introduce us to the rich and varied cuisine of Indonesia and its 17,000 islands. “Indonesia is not just Bali and Jakarta,” she says. Today we’re eating dishes from East Java, where she grew up. The people there love to party, she says, and the food matches their spirit. “You will experience spicy, salty, sour, sweet. All the flavors come together.”
As we dig in, we learn about each other: a married couple who lives in the neighborhood and wanted to try something new; a young UI/UX designer who loves to cook and is attending her third League of Kitchens class; a pair of newlyweds about to go to Indonesia for their honeymoon.
We also learn about Woworuntu and the dark story hidden behind her warm smile. After losing her job as a financial bank analyst and trader in Indonesia, she came to the United States in 2001 at age 25, thinking she was getting a job in hospitality. It was a trap: She was taken at the airport and sold into sex trafficking. She escaped—twice—and was instrumental in convicting her captors, only to spend the next three years living on the streets of New York. She’s since dedicated her life to giving trafficking survivors the support she didn’t have by founding a nonprofit, Mentari, through which she teaches cooking classes to help survivors find work. She traveled the world speaking and consulting with governments and NGOs, including as a member of the first U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking in 2015.
“Cooking is my healing,” Woworuntu says. Food also played a role in helping other survivors. “I used to sit with the victims, give them tea, and talk, giving them food and getting to know them.” That opens up the conversation to dig “beneath the surface of this person,” she says.
She brings that philosophy to her classes, too.
“‘How do I become a blessing for people?’” she asks herself. “It [takes] courage to come to my table without knowing who I am, who will be [there]. Food is a platform for people to speak, to get connected, to share. I think it’s just amazing how they open up.”
Cultural Immersion
It helps that she is a generous teacher and animated storyteller, welcoming us into the fold of her family and culture. We meet her husband, Randy, a retired police officer, and her 17-year-old son, Nick, our greeter—and her (paid!) dishwasher and trusty assistant.
Woworuntu introduces ingredients paired with folklore and childhood stories, or expert kitchen tips. She measures garlic and shallots by handfuls—“how my mom and grandma taught me,” she says—and passes them into our hands so we can feel the weight. She lets us taste some truly special items: fragrant lime leaves and juicy white ginger from her backyard; smoked coconut sugar and kopi luwak (civet coffee) from recent travels to Indonesia. To help slice through a block of tamarind pulp for us to try, she swiftly brings a hammer down onto her chef’s knife, grinning all the while, until the dense, sticky fruit yields.
She’s also a blazing-fast cook. As we don our aprons, she bounces between showing us our next tasks, tending multiple pans on the stove, and putting out our fires (once nearly an actual one) without breaking a sweat.
We are far less dexterous. But our teacher is cheerful and encouraging, even when we cut the garlic the wrong way and spill gobs of half-cooked omelet onto her stove: “Don’t worry, don’t worry!” she sings, unfazed as the flames leap up from the oil.
We bond as we cook, cheering each other’s triumphant omelet flips and reaching over to save wobbly bowls from disaster.
“How many chiles should we add?” Woworuntu asks us, mixing batter for fritters. “Maybe 15?” We glance at each other, mumble unconvincing “Sure”s. “Ten, then,” she relents. We collectively exhale.
When we fall unprompted into an assembly line to roll and fill klepon, balls of pandan mochi stuffed with coconut sugar and rolled in coconut shavings, Woworuntu can’t stop giggling and snapping photos.
Three hours later, we finally sit down for our feast: corn and shrimp fritters, perfumed with lime leaf and fried to a golden crisp; cucumbers dipped in bumbu kacang, a sweet-and-savory peanut sauce I want to eat by the spoonful; and plate-sized egg and tofu omelets, loaded with bean sprouts, a second kind of peanut sauce, and fried shallots, all served with rice and crackers. For dessert, we’ve made caramelized bananas topped with condensed milk, chocolate sprinkles, and shredded mozzarella (don’t knock it ’til you try it); and the klepon, crowded on giant platters like snowball cookies in pastel green. A student remarks that she now understands why our welcome spread was a “snack.”
“I like to feed people,” Woworuntu later tells me. “Because my grandma used to feed people.” Her family owned several food businesses in Indonesia, and from a young age she learned to help cook traditional dishes for their many employees.
“I think I got it from family culture,” she continues. “They believe if you feed people, one day, if [your family’s future generation] needs food, someone will feed them.”
It extends beyond the table, too. “I think if you share kindness with other people, it’s contagious.”
Breaking Bread, Building Bridges
Woworuntu sends us off with bursting stomachs, Tupperware full of leftovers, and yet more gifts: precious lime leaves and cucumbers from her garden, apples from her second home in upstate New York, and even an invitation to join her there on her next family escape.
For the newlyweds, she ducks into a room and emerges with a vibrant Indonesian fabric sash for the bride to wear on their trip. “Are you sure?” she asks, eyes wide. Yes, Woworuntu insists, pushing it into her hands and telling them to let her know if they need anything else. “We’ll text you,” the husband says with a smile.
Gross says these scenes are common at the end of classes. “Everyone’s hugging, everyone’s exchanging numbers, people feel that the instructors are like their new favorite auntie,” she said. “There’s something really magical that happens on an emotional level of connection.”
The friendships formed can last long after. Damira Inatullaeva, the Uzbek instructor, recalled one student who took an online class and mailed her a painting of hands making Uzbek dumplings. Another student decided to travel to Uzbekistan, and they met up in Inatullaeva’s hometown of Samarkand.
“Before the class,” Inatullaeva marveled, “many of my students didn’t even know what Uzbekistan was.”
After spending time in an instructor’s home, she said, “you will think that our world is very different, very colorful, [with] a lot of different tastes.”
She’s experienced that firsthand: She loves taking other League of Kitchens classes herself, as many instructors do.
“I love Nepali momos, I love Argentinian alfajores, I love Greek salad and spanakopita,” Inatullaeva said. Her favorite is New York pizza.
So while she’s proud of her heritage, she stops short of calling Uzbek cuisine the best. “All the cuisines of the world, they are unique. I discovered that here in New York,” she said.
She recalled that when she first came to the United States, she resolved not to cook Uzbek food—only “American food.” After 10 years in America—nine of which she’s spent teaching for the League of Kitchens—she’s revised her resolution.
“I want my Uzbek cuisine to also be part of American cuisine,” she said. “This is my dream.”
The rich tapestry that is America continues to be woven; Gross sees that as something to champion. “Our instructors, they are representatives of their cultures, but they’re also New Yorkers. They’re Americans,” she said. “They value very deeply preserving their traditions and recipes, but they also go out to eat Thai food, and love pizza, and cook varied cuisines in their homes. They interact with other people from other cultures, their lives are rich with many cultures, and the best things coexist.”
For Gross, fostering these cross-cultural connections is the most powerful part of the League of Kitchens.
“All the time we hear from students who say, ‘This part of the world that felt abstract and distant now feels personal and meaningful,’” she said.
“That is the great hope of what we do: create peace and love and connection between people who are different, through storytelling, through sharing, through food.”
Get Cooking
The League of Kitchens offers cooking workshops in-person in the New York area (2.5 hours for $175, 4.5 hours for $220) and online (2.5 hours, $60 per device). In-person classes include a welcome snack or lunch, hands-on cooking instruction, and a shared meal. Online classes include live, interactive cooking instruction and a virtual dinner party; a list of ingredients and equipment is provided in advance. All students receive a packet of the instructor’s family recipes and background information. LeagueOfKitchens.com
For a kitchen companion to keep closer at hand, Lisa Kyung Gross and the school’s instructors have published “The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods, and Favorite Family Recipes From Around the World” (November 2024). Gross’s warm encouragement guides readers through recipes detailed enough to be mini cooking lessons, while instructor profiles and anecdotes add deeper meaning to every dish.
Kitchen Secrets
For Lisa Kyung Gross, running the League of Kitchens has been “the best culinary school you could imagine,” she said. She shared some of her top takeaways from their instructors.
Use the best ingredients you can get. “Your food will only taste as good as the quality of your ingredients,” Gross said. Many instructors emphasize using in-season produce and shop at several different places to get exactly what they want.
Freshly toast and grind your own spices. Gross has noticed this makes an especially big difference in flavor for cumin and coriander. She recommends toasting the seeds in a completely dry pan over the lowest heat possible until they’re aromatic and crisp (cumin should be easily broken with a fingernail; coriander should almost shatter between your molars). Let them cool to room temperature before grinding in a spice mill or coffee grinder (one not used for coffee).
Pay attention to the little things. Here lies the difference between “good food and great food,” Gross said: the nuances and tricks that come naturally to a home cook with years of experience. Removing the seeds from grape tomatoes prevents watery guacamole; the contrast between paper-thin red onions and bigger-than-you’d-think tomato wedges makes an ultra-satisfying Greek salad; breaking down chicken into smaller-than-you’d-think pieces exposes more bone marrow and lends extra flavor to an Afghan curry. The delicious is in the details.
Cook with love. Every instructor prescribes this most important ingredient. This means “cooking with intention, with attention, with care,” Gross said. “If you’re grumpy, don’t cook,” added Shandra Woworuntu. “You have to be kind to the food.” For Damira Inatullaeva, it was her grandmother’s most important kitchen advice: “Don’t forget to think good thoughts about the people for whom you’re cooking.”
From Nov. Issue, Volume IV
