Chef Clara PArk, founder

Chef Clara Park is truly passionate about teaching people how to cook. Her earliest food memory is of the pumpkin porridge her grandmother made her from an “old pumpkin” that had grown in their backyard garden in South Jersey (go Garden state!). Park’s lifelong fascination with food began at an early age when she used her parents’ credit card points to subscribe to “Food and Wine” magazine at age 12. She attended the University of Chicago then Columbia University where she dropped out of the PhD program with “only a Master’s in biology”. Park put herself through culinary school via the work-study program at the Institute of Culinary Education in NYC then honed her skills in Michelin-starred restaurants in San Francisco, Napa Valley, Philadelphia, and New York. A highly skilled recipe developer, past clients include Campbell’s Soup, Swanson, Pepperidge Farm, Tabasco and Nature’s Bakery. As a culinary development chef, Park created hundreds of products for the nation’s top grocers, including Costco. She developed menus for all tiers of restaurant dining and trained both front and back of house hospitality professionals. Park has had her work featured in Philadelphia magazine, The Huffington Post, and www.plateonline.com. Other career highlights include winning Best Burger in Philly in 2016, emerging victorious on the Food Network’s Chopped, eating live octopus with chefs Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert and getting kids excited about cooking and food science as a contestant on Netflix’s Snack vs. Chef. She is on the board for The Food Lab at Drexel University and the advisory council for the Culinary Literacy Center at the Free Library of Philadelphia. To this day she still gets excited about a perfectly cooked steak, plate of delicate handmade pasta or silky vinaigrette. You can follow her on Instagram @claraparkcooks.