• Knife Skills Class at the Brooklyn Kitchen

  100 Frost St., nr. Meeker St., Williamsburg; 718-349-5032

  The most elemental kitchen skill is handling a knife smoothly, safely, and authoritatively (and that goes double if your dinner guests are watching and you are a show-off). Nearly everything else about cooking descends from there: Precise and even chopping means even cooking, and once you’re good at it, dinner gets on the table a lot more quickly, too. A pleasingly laid-back and affordable option for home cooks who want to hone their skills, Brendan McDermott’s $40 class at the Brooklyn Kitchen packs plenty of instruction into 90 minutes. Bring your own preferred chef’s knife, and he’ll take you through sharpening, basic slicing and dicing, and on to the arcane worlds of brunoise and batonnet cuts. The grand finale: a demonstration of a surgical strike on a whole chicken.

From the 2010 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine