Jo Glazebrook manages the Brighton Community Kitchen, a social enterprise just minutes from Brighton station where cooking, learning and community come together. From free daytime classes to evening sessions with local chefs, Jo shares how the kitchen inspires confidence, connection and creativity through food.
Photocredits: Xav Buendia
What is the concept at the Brighton Community Kitchen?
The Community Kitchen is a cookery school run by the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, a non-profit organisation that has been active since 2006. We are a place where everyone can cook, learn new skills and enjoy food together. Open since 2018 we are located just five minutes from Brighton station and operate as a social enterprise.
During the day, we host free or low-cost cooking classes for the community. These host a wide range of people, including those with low incomes, long-term mental or physical health issues, older people with dementia, and various school and community groups. While we receive some funding for these classes, we also need to generate additional income to keep the kitchen running.
To do this, we offer paid for evening and weekend cooking classes led by local chefs, cooks and restaurateurs. These courses cover a variety of cuisines from around the world and also teach specific skills like bread making, cake decorating, and patisserie.Our classes are fun and relaxed and finish with a sit-down meal around our communal dining table. The kitchen is also available to hire for private events, such as birthday parties, supper clubs, team building events, recipe development for restaurants and many community groups use our space for their own events.
Thanks to our community’s support through buying tickets for our events, our 60+ volunteers giving their time and chefs giving their expertise we have hosted over 1000 sessions helping to tackle social isolation and promote healthier eating.
What is your role at the Brighton Community Kitchen?
I manage the kitchen which involves supporting the staff team, freelance chefs, our team of volunteers , looking after the venue and day to day operations of the school, ensuring it runs smoothly, planning new courses and events, managing the budget and fundraising. This includes organising ticketed public classes, scheduling and designing private events and handling venue hire for outside groups.
Overall I support the team to provide a great experience for participants and people who come here.
Describe a typical day.
My typical day is probably a mix of kitchen operations and business management so – bookings, promo, income generation team management and communications. A key aspect of my job is to forge connections with community groups and partners to work towards our sustainability as a social enterprise.
We have made lots of lovely friends who support us across the hospitality and small local business sector.
In some way we experience similar challenges so it’s great to be able to connect and collaborate and support each other. Some of my mates think I sit around eating food made by lovely people all day which is a percentage of my job which i’ll always enjoy but it’s equally about cleaning out a dishwasher with an old toothbrush.
What do you like most about working at the Community Kitchen?
I love the unique combination of hospitality and community that our kitchen provides. Since we have opened we have seen thousands of people share good food, and conversation around our long dining table. My favourite part is the sense of community that forms—not just among our guests but also with our amazing volunteers, who range in age from 16 to 80.
Everyone brings a curiosity about food and life and culture and we learn so much from each other.
When people walk through our door with an open mind and a readiness to have a good time, it makes our work feel effortless and joyful. We’re not just teaching cooking; we’re creating a space for people to make new friends, share stories, and simply feel good. I’ve spent my career working in both hospitality and the community sector, and this role is the perfect combination of both, which is why I love it.
We all have our own sense of what personal achievement feels like in the kitchen and we get to see all versions of it here so when someone says that since coming on one of our community cookery courses their kitchen confidence has ‘transformed’ or that they now feel “more able to share meals with others” we feel like we have done our jobs properly.
You work with a variety of well known chefs and suppliers in Brighton, tell us more.
We work with a wide variety of chefs and cooks from across Brighton and Hove to deliver our income generating cookery classes, many of whom have donated their time to do fundraisers for us. It is so nice hearing their food stories and I love that we can learn and teach recipes inspired from families and homes across the world, and also what to do with 20kg of surplus cabbages. We love to bridge the gap between community organisations and the hospitality industry, both have so much to learn and gain from working together. We can help tackle food waste, share knowledge with our community, feed people and bring people together over a shared meal.
We buy the majority of our food for the kitchen and we get some surplus from Infinity Foods Wholesale and FareShare which is great as it enables us to show people how to adapt recipes and be spontaneous with ingredients.
We also use Shrub for our fresh produce, vegetables from our community growing spaces, Brighton Permaculture Trust, Butlers Wine Cellar, Barfields, Sussex Grazed, and BNFS. Our chef and cookery leader are huge champions of seasonal produce so it’s exciting to see what they come up with when we get a surprise bicycle delivery of chard freshly picked from the Wellbeing Gardens in Stanmer Park.
What courses do you have coming up?
We are moving into our Autumn season now and have a full calendar from September onwards including Pizza with Brigi from Pizzaface , Japanese, Indian, Nigerian, Mexican, Cake Decorating, Chocolate Making and Bread Making. We have already added some of our xmas classes including Festive Canapes , Xmas Baking Showstopper, our legendary Cheese and Wine fundraiser with Cheese Author Pat McGuigan and wine guru Helen Chesshire.
We are also co-hosting a couple of special networking events for Connected Brighton including Surplus Supper Club on 9th October in collaboration with our friend Sussex Surplus. We have bookings coming in for xmas parties and celebrations and it’s one of our busiest periods.
Is the kitchen available for event hire and if so, what sort of businesses usually hire the venue for what type of events?
Our fully-equipped kitchen is available for hire and we regularly host local businesses and community groups at the Community Kitchen. We run team building events, private cookery birthday parties, hen do’s, chef training programmes and kitchen development days. We’ve had a book launch here, an album launch – we love putting on unique events and love a challenge creating something new and fun.
Which is your favourite style of cuisine and why?
If I had to choose, I absolutely love a variety of different Asian cuisines including Thai, Japanese & Indian. But I’m also a huge fan of a jacket potato or a fishfinger sandwich and think most meals can be improved with an egg on it.
When dining out in Brighton or Sussex, where would you visit for brunch and dinner and why?
I’m going to mention some of our supporters and local chefs who teach in our kitchen here. I love going to informal places that feel like you are in someone’s home so I especially love Palmito. Their menu is so fun and inspiring and Diego is such a champion of local producers. Chef Kanthi at the Spice Circuit Kitchens food makes me really happy as it’s so wholesome and full of character and his chefs table is such a cute dining experience. I can’t wait for the opening of the new Namo Restaurant to see what Bookie has up her sleeve with this new venture. Her food is so good. Last week I had the Bento Box at Bonsai Plant Kitchen (twice in one week actually) which was just so tasty and amazing value so that’s going to be a regular thing in my diary now.
Locally to the kitchen the lovely people at Love Fit cafe do a great jacket potato for lunch and I think a sandwich from Earls always puts a smile on my face.
Best piece of advice you can offer to a home cook?
I think a slow cooker can be a total game changer if you want to cook from scratch but don’t have loads of time, especially over winter when you need something warming and nourishing and its super low on energy costs too. One of our Community classes focuses on Low Energy cooking and looks at smart cooking and meal planning and gives people a slow cooker to take home.