The Awaiting Table - Italian cooking school
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Recently voted one of the best cooking schools Sly in the kitchenin Italy by Food and Wine Magazine – the representative of Puglia at the prestigious La Dolce Vita in London - The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy, is a small, intimate Italian cooking school in the most beautiful town in the entire sunny south of Italy.
Our cooking classes in Italy offer hands-on cookery lessons designed to both improve your cooking AND allow you to go deeper into the culture than you ever thought possible. Here, you'll get to know the locals by their first names, talk first-hand at the market with butchers, winemakers, fishmongers and proud farmers, so local that they still have soil under their fingernails Go ahead, ask Luigi where his produce is from and he'll lean out the market door and point. Ask when he picked it and he'll beam and rattle that morning's dew onto the market floor.

We'll fill our woven straw baskets and return to the school for active, hands-on communal cooking, where you'll learn to make perfect pasta-and how to sauce it properly, learn how to make fresh sausages, bake beautiful biscotti, grill perfect seafood, all from scratch, all starting from amazingly-fresh ingredients. You'll fill a pretty enamel colander with herbs from the school's herb garden,and as our meal starts to come together, we'll pair it with the local wines of the Salento, widely-regarded in Italy as among Italy's best for their gutsy, dry but fruit-forward appeal.

And where are we, exactly? Close your eyes and imagine the Italian 'boot'; we're in the stiletto heel, the long strip of fertile land lapped by two blue coasts, in the sunny and sensuous, baroque city of Lecce, the vibrant cultural capital of the Salentine Penisula, Come find out what Italy is like with you leave behind the crowds, queues and turnstyles. Here folks smile when they see you, ask where you're from.

But vacations at The Awaiting Table Cookery School are not only about meeting the friendly locals or seafood still dripping with the Mediterranean or even what will likely be your favourite new wines; here in Lecce you'll learn to go deeper, gain context and learn to see the ongoing local dialogues between art and food, history and language, religion and place, and how any real understanding need always be systemic.

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"Specialising in small, intimate hands-on classes based on personalised instruction and individual attention."

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Creating magic in the Awaiting Table kitchen....

We're small and intimate-we limit our Italian cookery courses to only six participants a week, more for our castle weeks, so we fill up early, Reserve a place now. We'd love to have you at The Table.

Come Be A Local! The Awaiting Table Italian Cooking School offers hands-on cookery courses in Lecce, Italy. In our Italian cooking classes, learn about regional pasta, local wine, and the healthy yet succulent dishes of the Mediterranean Diet. The perfect cooking holiday in Italy with full immersion in Italian culture, food and wine.
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The Awaiting Table Italian Cooking School offers cookery courses in Lecce, Italy. In our Italian cooking classes, learn regional pasta, wine, and savory and succulent dishes. Come be a local: holidays include visits to vineyards and wineries, markets and olive groves in season. The perfect vacation for people who want to be immersed in Italian culture and food.
Learn about our cooking school programs, our founder, the locals you’ll meet and our accommodations.
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