Alessandro “Alex” De Luca, an Italian chef, and his partner Jennifer Morris have found a niche in Springfield’s restaurant scene by offering a plethora of cooking classes.
You can poke your fingers into focaccia, roll out homemade pasta with flour-crusted fingers or even prepare a special meal in less than 30 minutes for busy weeknights. De Luca and Morris run the Italian Kitchen, and they teach customers how to make authentic Italian dishes.
A long way from his homeland of Torino, Italy, De Luca says he’s having a wonderful time.
“This is my passion,” he said. “I really care about what kind of food I provide. It is a personal connection to whoever eats your food.”
De Luca and Morris offer catering, have some grab-and-go items like full lasagnas, and a party room, but classes have been their unexpected success.
De Luca’s mother, a terrible cook, is the reason he started cooking
De Luca’s upbringing was the “perfect storm” that led him to become a chef.
“My mother was a terrible cook, that is the reason I cook. Terrible,” he said. “I grew up eating pasta with marinara sauce all the years to the point I couldn’t eat pasta. My dad liked to eat a lot of good stuff, so we went to nice restaurants to eat good stuff and I was exposed to a cornucopia of good food.”
De Luca’s passion for food began at a young age. As an adult, he pursued a career in marketing. When he decided to move to the United States, De Luca wanted a Plan B in case he ever lost his marketing job.
De Luca went to culinary school in Italy and then moved to Florida. He later came to Springfield where he got married, had a child and divorced, but stayed in the Ozarks to be close to his child.
Switching to Plan B during the pandemic
The Italian Kitchen began in 2020 at the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic, when De Luca lost his marketing job and Plan B came in handy. De Luca started it as a food delivery service, since restaurant dining rooms were shuttered. He’d make a meal and deliver it.
“I was renting a kitchen in a restaurant,” he said. “I was collecting orders on Facebook. It went quite well, but it didn’t explode.”
Then the chef found a remote marketing job, so his culinary creations got put on the back burner. But friends and former customers kept asking him about his food.
In September 2023, De Luca and Morris decided to open the Italian Kitchen, focusing on catering and online orders from meal apps like GrubHub and DoorDash. Mondays and Tuesdays were slow, which is common in the restaurant industry. In October, they added cooking classes on those days.
“Then boom, classes exploded,” De Luca said.
Getting away from apps, connecting to customers
It was perfect because De Luca and Morris wanted to get away from meal delivery apps. With those, they’d be slammed during meal times and it was highly stressful, then they’d wait around for the next rush.
With the apps, they’d have about 15 minutes to fill an order, so food had to be made ahead of time. If Alfredo sauce didn’t sell that week, they had to toss it, and they had a lot of waste.
De Luca also didn’t like the lack of connection to the customer.
“I need to see the faces when people try the food they never had before,” he said. “We had a lot of customers who never tried our food and they come for the class. It is immediate gratification.”
A variety of classes offered throughout the week
The classes have become the Italian Kitchen’s signature, and are held Monday-Friday. Most of the classes cost $50, but some special occasion classes cost more.
The Monday class is recipes you can cook in less than 30 minutes. These are geared towards busy parents.
On Tuesday, they have two pasta classes, one for lunch and one for dinner. These are very popular courses.
Wednesday is always about bread. Customers might learn how to bake sourdough, focaccia or breadsticks. Classes include a meal (even bread classes) and hands-on learning, and students take home what they cook.
Thursday is the wild card day. There may be a course on risotto or a classic dessert.
Friday is date night and that has a different structure than the others because De Luca does most of the cooking for participants. They only assemble the dessert and it’s something easy. It’s an actual date so they have a chance to spend time together.
“They come just for ambiance and different food,” De Luca said. “Every date night has a different theme. You might have a three-course meal from Rome or Sicily. If you want to come to two in a month, you will find different things so you can explore what is real Italian food. It is an experience.”
Also, they do not have a liquor license, so it is BYOB.
Party room also available at Italian Kitchen
The Italian Kitchen has a party room that customers can book for lunch, a birthday party, a meeting or a dinner on Saturday. Here’s how it works: The room is free to book, but participants buy a meal from the Italian Kitchen. The prices start at $12.99 for a taco bar or pasta bar and go up to $14.99, $15.99 and up to $21.99 if someone wants seafood.
The menu is determined ahead of time and includes salad and dessert.
The room holds a maximum of 22, but you don’t have to have that many people to book the room.
Morris’ restaurant experience has been essential
This business gives De Luca and Morris more flexibility than a traditional restaurant and it’s their first venture together. De Luca and Morris met a year and a half ago, clicked and started dating.
“We spend 24 hours a day together,” De Luca said. “We cook together, live together, work together. We are doing something stressful and not a single fight in a year and a half.”
Morris has worked in restaurants over the years and has been essential to their business.
“She is very important because there are a bunch of American recipes, I have no idea what they are,” De Luca said. “Last week, someone said ‘Can you make breakfast casserole?’ We don’t make breakfast casserole in Italy. She said, ‘I know how to do it.’ We do Mexican food and she is in charge with that because I have no experience. She does all the baking. Baking is about precision, and I am not that.”
So far, this is a fantastic second career.
“With marketing, there are a lot of variables that can cripple your results: if the product is not good, if the company doesn’t want to spend money, it can take time,” De Luca said. “Cooking is different. It makes me happy to see people happy and the result is immediate. People are really enjoying the classes. It’s fun.”
