Five Hours: The Market First, the Kitchen After

Five hours is long for a cooking class, and the extra time goes where it should: into the shopping.

You meet outside the Teatro Argentina at Largo Argentina and go grocery shopping in the centre with a chef, through markets and specialist shops. What you learn there is the part most classes skip entirely: how to tell a good tomato from a red one, what to look at on a piece of cheese, why the price of two apparently identical hams differs by a factor of three. Quality discernment is the operator's phrase for it, and it is the skill that survives the trip home.

Then the kitchen. You make pasta by hand from scratch and cook traditional dishes built around whatever the season has produced, so the menu is not fixed and follows what you bought.

Lunch is what you made, eaten together with Italian wine and other drinks included.

Eight guests at most, minimum two, taught in English or Spanish. Vegetarian versions if you say so at booking.

One thing to know before booking: this experience is non-refundable, with no free cancellation window.