New Orleans School of Cooking — Attraction in New Orleans

Horrible. We booked a class with NOSOC through a third party. I have food allergies. The allergies were listed in the booking. My husband called the restaurant a week before the class to confirm the allergies. When we checked in to the event, we confirmed again the allergies and were told, don’t worry, we don’t use those after checking a piece of paper (what I assume to be a list of food upside in cooking but I really don’t know what paper he checked). You are fine. We attend the class. Very nice cooking instructor and wait staff. They demonstrate the meal, they bring me out the allergy safe meal along with the recipe for the allergy safe meal and I see my allergies in the bowl. I point this out to the wait staff. They apologize and say we will bring you double of the next one. I read the recipe and it doesn’t show the allergies in the list of ingredients. It is at this point that I don’t want to eat anything from this place because they don’t know what they are putting in their food and calling it safe for people with allergies. The wait staff see that I don’t touch any of the food and ask me to speak to the owner afterwards. I do. We tell her that we turned in my allergies and they still Served me food that contained my allergens. She then showed me the form she got from The third party provider and said it wasn’t on there. We then showed her the phone number that we called the week before. She asked who we talked to a week ago. I don’t know. Didn’t know we would need to write that down. We did give her the phone number and said we spoke to a lady. She said they don’t always communicate with the cooking staff. We also told the owner we informed the person we checked in with today about the allergies. She said “they don’t always communicate to the chef. That’s not on me”. I then asked her how would she feel If she had allergies if this happened to her? She then said she was giving us a full refund and to never come back.

Ma’am. I don’t ever want to come back. I already have a hard enough time trying to go out to eat and not being cross contaminated and trusting someone else to make food for me that isn’t going to hurt me. But to have your attitude of “it isn’t my fault” when you served me food that your staff knew I was allergic to. No thank you. This place is off my places to go again.

My husband does not have allergies. And he had a nice meal and good experience. But if you have allergies, don’t trust this place to keep you safe.

I didn’t come and talk to you today to ask for a refund. I wanted to understand what failure happened so that I could feel safe booking another food experience again from you or another venue. But it was very clear to me today that you felt no remorse or responsibility for keeping my food safe for me today. Yes I was upset. But I didn’t want the refund. I wanted a meal that I could enjoy with my husband that we had been looking forward to and not being presented with food with my allergies in it.

You had one job today. To provide a food experience that wasn’t going to hurt me. I had 2 jobs today. To pay for the experience and do everything possible to inform you of my allergies. I held up to my end. You didn’t hold up to your end. It’s now 4:00, 4 hours past lunch time. I held up to my end of my jobs, you didn’t hold up to your end of your job.

If you don’t have allergies, it was a good time. If you have allergies, bring your own food safe for yourself. Or don’t go at all if you can’t sit there for 2 hours smelling and watching someone cook food...

Oh boy, I really hate to write this review. I first visited the New Orleans School of Cooking years ago for team building. It was an amazing time and experience, so I decided to take my mom for her birthday this past Sunday. First off, the class started late. It was supposed to ‪start at 4pm‬ and no one bothered to announce they were running behind. We ended up starting about 10 minutes late. We’re led to a room with a big table which has bread, beer, wine and water (which is unlimited throughout the class). The bread was super hard (like stale hard). I poured some beer and proceeded to my cooking station.

Throughout the entire class, gnats were all over the place..flying around the beer, wine and bread. Gross! Luckily, they didn’t bother the food ingredients that were all sitting out. Now on to the actual class experience. The instructor was really nice and I could tell he enjoyed what he was doing. Unfortunately, the class was disorganized. It took us over an hour to make the appetizer (meat pies). I’ve been to other cooking classes and we were able to work on several dishes concurrently. It took sooooo long to cook the entire meal (one dish at a time). With two people at each cook top, we could have easily cooked all 4 courses in one hour. We had two frying pans (each with oil) but was not told that we needed to use one for the veal and the other for the ratatouille. So we picked the wrong one, and our ratatouille was drowning in oil. When we asked the instructor about it, he told us we used the wrong pan. The meat pie got cold as we fried the veal, and the veal got cold while we were cooking the ratatouille, which got cold while we were making the dessert (chocolate pecan pie). The veal was a poor cut and I could barely chew portions of it. The ground beef used in the meat pies was of bad quality also.

Other concerns were just cleanliness in general. The utensils didn’t look the cleanest. Also, I didn’t appreciate the fact that the instructor was touching our food. When the meat pies were done baking, he picked them up with his hands and put them on our plate. He also garnished our finished plates with his bare hands. Not once throughout the class did I see him wash his hands. I cringed every time I saw him touch something and could only hope that we didn’t get sick afterwards.

This place used to be great, but now I cannot recommend. At $139 a person, I...

We ended our cruise on May 4, 2025 but our flight didn't leave until late that afternoon so I was looking for something to do to fill our time. I found this and was excited because I love to cook and anytime I can take a cooking class, I do it. The price was excellent and so was the time. My husband and I showed up a bit early as we had been wandering around the area for a couple hours killing time and were greeted cheerfully by the staff. We perused the store as we waited. They have some really nice cook books and other gadgets in there for sale. We were given praline samples to try as well. There were 3 classes going on and the other 2 were taken to their respective kitchens and then Chef Eric came and retrieved our class. When the class started I was unsure of how I would like it since I was seated closer to the back but happily there was a mirror on the ceiling so you could see all the ingredients and how he was doing everything on the stove regardless of where you sat. There were tables set up with place settings, pitchers of ice water and unsweet tea. There was a lazy susan in the middle of each table with seasonings, sugar, etc. Chef Eric is very knowledgeable and charismatic which made the experience amazing! He taught us how to make bread pudding, gumbo, jambalaya, and pralines. He explained the history behind each dish, the steps to prepare it, the reasonings behind certain things and then we all got to eat each dish. I was stuffed! I thoroughly enjoyed this class and wish we lived in NOLA so I could go all the time. When we left I bought some of the seasonings and sauces he used in the class to make the dishes. I 100% recommend this class to anyone. Even if you aren't much of a cook. And if/when I come back to NOLA, I'll be booking it again, maybe even the hands on cooking one. I didn't see that one when I booked but I don't regret doing...