January 6, 2022

A Day in the Life: Chef Alyssa Wilen

After rebounding from the pandemic, the teacher and entrepreneur wants to make Chef Alyssa’s Kitchen an even bigger part of the Charlotte community

By Allison Braden

In 2013, Chef Alyssa Gorelick was at a turning point in her career. She had worked her way up through Charlotte restaurants, eventually helming the kitchen as executive chef at Fern and making two trips to New York City to cook at the James Beard House. At the urging of her then-boyfriend, Andrew Wilen, she left the restaurant world to offer cooking classes at a small space in Atherton Market. Their business, Chef Alyssa’s Kitchen, took off. It racked up awards and was listed among the best cooking classes nationwide. In 2018, the Wilens — by then married — opened a custom, state-of-the-art space in LoSo, expanded their class roster, and launched a popular Saturday morning brunch.

Then came the pandemic. For six months, Chef Alyssa’s Kitchen switched to online classes and private virtual events. When they carefully reopened, class enrollment dropped and became less predictable. But the business was buoyed by kids’ camps and Family Table Meals, a to-go model that Alyssa believes is here to stay. Saturday brunch remains on hold. But the obstacles don’t seem likely to slow down Chef Alyssa’s Kitchen in the long run. The business has the accolades and momentum to expand beyond Charlotte, but it turns out that Wilen’s ambitions lie closer to home.

Here’s what a day in her life looks like.

6 a.m. Wilen’s kids — 2-year-old Aubrey and 10-month-old Arlo — are her alarm clock. “Usually it’s my son who’s up, so he wakes up, I grab him a bottle, and I’m able to have some time with him before my daughter wakes up.” She spends the early morning getting them ready for preschool but tries to work in a little playtime before her workday begins.

8 a.m. She drops the kids off then works out for an hour or so at the Levine Jewish Community Center. Back at home in Cherry, she makes breakfast and dives into work in the home office she shares with Andrew. The comfortable space is a holdover from when the business was based out of Atherton Market and the pair needed room to develop ideas, plan events, and chart the future of their startup. It still serves that purpose. Here, Wilen checks email, writes recipes for upcoming classes, and collaborates with her husband and business partner.

“Recipe writing used to be very daunting,” she says. “It’s something that I can go through very quickly now — but it’s taken a long time.” Wilen takes inspiration from memorable restaurant meals, cookbooks, and her own archives, and she sees the process as a creative challenge. “I always change recipes for every season and every class and every time we offer it,” she says. Developing a recipe or menu for a class can take a couple of weeks, and the dish has to be more than just tasty. The recipe has to fit within the class time, usually two to three hours; go through rigorous testing; and suit the students’ varied skill levels.

12 p.m. On the days she’s teaching a class herself, Wilen heads to the business’s space at Bowers, the same Lower South End complex that houses Brewers at 4001 Yancey. On the way, she may stop by Lincoln’s Haberdashery on South Boulevard for a sandwich. “Or,” she says, “while I’m at work, a lot of times I just grab whatever I can put together. You know, go through the cooler and make a sandwich or a big mixing bowl salad.”

She arrives at the intersection of the day, when she can check in with morning staff and prep for class in the evening: “I’m setting up and scaling out ingredients, getting products in, setting up the classroom, working with the team that’s going to be working with me — my culinary assistants — for the class I’m working on. A lot of times, especially now, we have two classes going on at once, so I’ll be setting up one in the main room and then I’ll have a private event in the other room.”

Wilen says she and her team used to have a good grasp of their market. They knew what would attract students, how fast classes would fill up, and how often to post offerings online. The pandemic changed all of that. “We lost so much business, even when we came back with the classes, because we do a lot of team-building events and we do a lot of private events,” she says, and those are only just beginning to bounce back. In the past, she says, “we could try something new and we’d get a great response. Now, we’re a lot more nervous about putting out something new because we just don’t have as much interest as we did before.”

4 p.m. With her evening class set up, she sneaks home to fix dinner and spend a couple of hours with Arlo and Aubrey. When she’s teaching a class, Andrew will get them to bed, but at least one night a week, the couple teaches together, and Wilen’s mom, who lives in Charlotte, will come keep an eye on the kids.

6 p.m. Classes begin in the evening. Over the years, Wilen has developed her own teaching style, but she says it’s taken a lot of work. She points out that chefs and other back-of-house staff aren’t usually known for their charisma and public speaking. Plus, she says, “I’m not just teaching, but I’m kind of like the entertainment.” Though she says it’s something she and all her staff still work on, Wilen has hit on a style that’s earned rave reviews: She addresses students as if she’s talking to friends.

In some ways, teaching has also challenged her to rethink her approach to cooking — and she hopes her students will end up seeing food differently, too. In restaurant kitchens, chefs can take three days to develop layers of flavor. Home cooks don’t have that kind of time. Wilen is always trying to think about how she can take shortcuts that don’t sacrifice quality results. She makes class topics adaptable and points out ways to apply techniques in other contexts. She encourages students to source responsibly, by shopping at farmers’ markets and local spots like Orrman’s Cheese Shop. “It’s not just about the recipe,” she says. “It’s about the skills and also trying to influence people about how they buy food as well.”

10 p.m. Once class wraps up and her students have dined on their culinary creations, Wilen heads home. She unwinds on the couch with a glass of wine and catches up on the messages, news, and social media she’s missed during the day. She may put on a Jimmy Kimmel rerun before heading to bed around 11.

She dreams of expanding her take-home meal and catering operations, maybe by opening a dedicated kitchen. She wants to broaden her class offerings and focus on a wider range of techniques, from butchering to sauce-making. “I don’t have dreams of making Chef Alyssa’s Kitchen be around the country,” she says. “I just really want to make it a bigger part of the Charlotte community.”