The Commons
Everyone has a story to tell through food
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02
A little history

Once upon a time, we built the largest hands-on cooking class in the country.

Under LivingSocial, our team retrofitted a 200-year-old, 30,000-square-foot building in downtown Washington and named it 918 F Street. Without quite realizing it, we'd created something that existed nowhere else: a room where dozens of people cooked side by side, led by the best chefs in the city — and the biggest names in food.

Most nights were led by the city's top culinary talent — the chefs behind the restaurants people were already lined up to get into. But the magic showed up when we brought in national names who simply had a story to tell through food: a healthy-cooking class with Biz Markie, a night with Top Chef winner — and now host — Kristen Kish, dishes from José Andrés' Jaleo, and a molecular-gastronomy night led by the chef behind his minibar.

$10M+
In sales
150K
Guests per year
80
Events per week
300+
Unique concepts
200+
Premium partners
93
Net Promoter Score

It was voted the best cooking class in DC. Then LivingSocial pulled back, and in 2014, 918 F Street closed.

Nobody has reimagined the cooking class experience.

Until now.

03
Meet The Commons
A chain of high-end, large-scale teaching kitchens that power a media engine.

The only place to cook side by side with your city's best chefs, the creators you follow, and the celebrities you love — in a real, premium kitchen, with a meal and a drink in your hands at the end of the night.

A bigger room changes the math: large enough to bring in names a sixteen-seat class never could, and full enough that a seat still costs about what dinner does. It's kind of a big dill.

04
The experience

We reimagined the entire cooking class.

No measuring, no mess, no clean-up — just a smart, beautiful room and a night you made yourself.

First-of-a-kind stations
Every guest cooks like they're in their dream kitchen — induction, real tools, room to move.
A tablet at every station
Up-close looks at every technique, in real time, so nobody misses the moment.
A help button
Quietly signal a team member — for a technique, a clean utensil, or another cocktail.
Comfortable seating
Sit back and enjoy the multi-course meal you just made, paired with wine or cocktails.
A full staff
A world-class experience start to finish, from the first drink to the last plate.
The Commons room, full floor
The roomOne floor, twenty-plus stations, a chef's counter and a live camera crew — all at once.
Overhead view of the floor plan
The floor planEvery station sightlined to the chef. No bad seat in the house.
A single guest station
Your stationInduction, real tools, a tablet at eye level, everything in reach.
A night being filmed in the room
Camera-ready by designWe film one class per series without changing a thing about the night.
Design renderings — Los Angeles flagship
05
Who leads the room

Not just for chefs. Everyone has a story to tell through food.

Standard class
Led by chefs from the restaurants you love, marketed to their following and ours.
Creator class
Culinary and non-culinary talent with a real audience, turning their followers into a Friday night.
Celebrity class
Superstars in the kitchen — the nights people will remember for years.
Private events
Buy-outs of favorite concepts, booked at a premium.

A full year is about 50 partners: 16 house instructors who teach every week, and roughly 30 chefs, creators, and names who each come back for a few nights a year.

06
Why the talent says yes

We pay the talent to promote themselves.

For the best chefs, restaurateurs, and creators, the room is the easiest yes in food — paid, completely turnkey, and a content machine for their own brand.

Chefs & restaurateurs

Completely turnkey. Show up and cook — no discounting your tables, no closing your dining room for an event. Your restaurant never skips a beat.

Get paid. $600–$10,000+ a day, from ticket sales alone — and the ceiling goes higher.

Fill the room with future regulars. A sold-out crowd that leaves wanting to book a table.

Content you'd otherwise pay for. We film your food, your story, your recipes — the brand content a PR or social team charges thousands a month to make. We pay you to create it, and it's yours to keep.

Creators

Meet your audience in real life. The first place to turn an online following into a room full of people, around the food you all care about.

A format built for content. Every night is a shoot — footage, recipes, and moments produced for you.

A home base, not a one-off. A recurring, ownable way to be with your community offline.

Get paid. The same $600–$10,000+ a day as our chefs, from ticket sales alone — and that's before we layer in brand activations, which can increase what you earn dramatically.

Everywhere else, talent pays to market themselves. Here, we pay them — and hand them the audience, the night, and the content.

07
A predictable, profitable model

We only fly the plane when it's full.

Every class is booked weeks ahead and released in batches, so we only ever run a room that's already sold. Staffing and ingredients barely vary, profit is engineered in, and an under-sold night simply gets consolidated or rescheduled. Concepts rotate constantly, so there's always a fresh reason to come back.

Forty-eight seats a class, twenty classes a week, with a blended ticket that averages around $143. Nine hundred classes is only about 50 partners. Our house instructors carry the weekly schedule; chefs, creators, and names bring their own crowds for the big nights.

A week in one room
Released as demand supports
One kitchen, seven days, four classes a day
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
Morning
Dry run
Open
Open
Dry run
Open
Class
Class
Midday
Private class
Private class
Dry run
Private class
Dry run
Class
Class
Early evening
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Evening
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class
Class — 48 seats, opened for sale in batches Private class — booked as a whole room Dry run — new concepts tested Open — room still to sell into

Demand is read in advance and seats are released in batches, so a room only ever runs once it's already full. Nights that lag get consolidated or rescheduled — the plane never flies empty, and we have time to get every night right.

08
An evergreen content engine

More content than Food Network. For a fraction of studio cost.

We film the best classes from every series — live, in front of a full room. A chain of rooms becomes a media machine, producing two kinds of content:

Hyper-local
The recipes and techniques behind your favorite local restaurants — taught by the people who actually make them.
Hyper-exciting
Creators, celebrities, and comedians in unscripted formats — pair a chef with a comedian and that's a series.
The room is the secret ingredient

The audience is part of the show.

This is the part no studio kitchen can fake: a room full of real people. They ask the questions you’d actually ask. They rub their eyes right after cutting a jalapeño. They laugh, they jump in, they pull the talent off-script. That back-and-forth is a brand-new kind of culinary storytelling — unscripted, human, impossible to manufacture — and it’s exactly what makes the content worth watching.

YouTubeSearchM
THE COMMONSCooking classes worth showing up for. Filmed live in Los Angeles.
TC
The Commons
@thecommons · 412K subscribers · 138 videos
New class every week, in front of a live room in Los Angeles. Come learn something.
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Classes▶ Play all
THE COMMONSCLASSKNIFE SKILLSEVERY CUT, ONE HOUR13:00
Knife Skills: the one hour that changes how you cook
412K views
THE COMMONSCLASSFRESH PASTAFLOUR, EGGS, NOTHING ELSE14:14
Fresh Pasta From Scratch, start to plate
289K views
THE COMMONSCLASSMASAFROM RAW CORN, ON THE COMAL12:27
Masa From Raw Corn, with a fourth generation East LA family
1.1M views
THE COMMONSCLASSCAST IRON STEAKONE PAN, ONE METHOD8:41
Cast Iron Steak: the only method you need
604K views
THE COMMONSCLASSBREAD DAYSTART TO LOAF24:33
Bread Day: start to loaf, one sitting
178K views
Cooking with Mom▶ Play all
THE COMMONSCOOKING WITH MOMHER RECIPESHE NEVER WROTE IT DOWN37:34
Cooking with Mom: the dish she never wrote down
4.8M views
THE COMMONSCOOKING WITH MOMSUNDAY POTFORTY YEARS RUNNING41:12
Cooking with Mom: forty years of the same Sunday pot
1.8M views
THE COMMONSCOOKING WITH MOMHER KITCHENWHERE ALL OF IT STARTED35:11
Cooking with Mom: the kitchen where all of it started
1.7M views
THE COMMONSCOOKING WITH MOMSHE CORRECTSHIM THE ENTIRE TIME38:08
Cooking with Mom: she corrects him the entire time
1.2M views
THE COMMONSCOOKING WITH MOMSUNDAY TABLEEVERYONE SHOWS UP30:14
Cooking with Mom: the table everyone shows up to
1.6M views
Stand-Up Kitchen▶ Play all
THE COMMONSSTAND-UP KITCHENOPENING SETBEFORE ANYONE EATS48:12
Stand-Up Kitchen: the opening set
6.6M views
THE COMMONSSTAND-UP KITCHENTHE ROOMFORTY EIGHT SEATS, SOLD OUT41:28
Stand-Up Kitchen: a full room on a Tuesday
8.2M views
THE COMMONSSTAND-UP KITCHENBEFORE DOORSTHE ROOM AT SIX44:05
Stand-Up Kitchen: the room at six, before doors
2.4M views
THE COMMONSSTAND-UP KITCHENTHE HECKLEFROM THE FRONT ROW45:15
Stand-Up Kitchen: heckled from the front row
2.2M views
THE COMMONSSTAND-UP KITCHENSOLD OUTTHREE NIGHTS RUNNING38:48
Stand-Up Kitchen: sold out three nights running
1.4M views
The Regulars: Los Angeles▶ Play all
THE COMMONSTHE REGULARSAFTER MIDNIGHTTHE TRUCK ON THE CORNER12:27
The Regulars: the truck that only opens after midnight
6.2M views
THE COMMONSTHE REGULARSTHE LINESTARTS AT SEVEN35:48
The Regulars: the line starts at seven
3.2M views
THE COMMONSTHE REGULARSTWENTY YEARSSAME PARKING LOT7:21
The Regulars: twenty years in the same parking lot
574K views
THE COMMONSTHE REGULARSTHE GRILLNEVER GOES OUT19:33
The Regulars: the grill that never goes out
283K views
THE COMMONSTHE REGULARSONE DISHHIS WHOLE LIFE9:12
The Regulars: one dish, his whole life
1.4M views

And the content lives wherever your audience already is — every class re-cut for each platform:

12:04
Long-form on YouTube
Shorts on TikTok
Reels on Instagram

Illustrative channel mock. Restaurants and creators shown are illustrative of the talent each market offers.

Thousands of videos. Thousands of recipes. On every platform.

The talent is paid at the door — $600 to $10,000+ a day — and those same tickets cover the entire cost of the shoot. And then some: the room turns a profit on its own, before a single sponsorship, brand deal, or view is counted. Every other studio spends money to make content and hopes to earn it back; we've already made ours.

Profitable on tickets alone. Content and brand partnerships are upside.

Slide 09 · The Engine

A flywheel that pays for itself, then compounds.

Talent and a paying audience spin one room into sold-out nights. The nights become content, the content grows the library, and the library pulls in the next wave of talent and guests. Each turn is bigger than the last.

The Engine The Commons Room Profitable on tickets alone
01 · Flows in
Talent + audience
Chefs · Creators · Celebs · Guests
02 · The night
Sold-out experiences
Ticketed · Filmed live
03 · Flows out
100+ hrs
Per room, every year
04 · Compounds
One growing library
Every platform
A series is a run of sold-out classes. One gets filmed.

We film the best class from every series without changing a thing about the night. That episode goes on the shelf for good: 100+ hours a year, from one room. Every episode and every format is owned outright.

Upside · compounding Content is high-margin
The library replayNow filming
Series · 6 classes
→
0Episodes on the shelf
0 hrsIn the library
0Formats owned
1 room The input
→
100+ hrs Every year, every platform
→
1,000s of hrs Across ten rooms
Already in the black
10
The portfolio at scale

Prove one room. Then build ten.

We open Los Angeles first and prove the economics in a single profitable room. Then we scale across the country — ten rooms over eight years — and the revenue compounds into a national network.

$3M
$9M
$15M
$26M
$43M
$65M
$88M
$106M
Yr 1Yr 2Yr 3Yr 4Yr 5Yr 6Yr 7Yr 8
Class — tickets, bar & private events Brand + content — the media line

One room becomes a network. $3M to $106M in revenue.

Class revenue is the profitable foundation — every room pays for itself on tickets alone. Brand and content stack on top: higher-margin upside that grows with the network's audience, not its rent.

11
The industry today

Bigger, better, and far more profitable than anything out there.

Every figure below is per single unit

A typical cooking class seats sixteen people who share burners and follow an instructor they've never heard of — or you pay $500-plus for a multi-week course at a culinary school. The Commons is a different category: personal stations, real talent, tablets and cameras at every seat, and a full bar.

Head to head — a single Commons room against the category’s best:

All figures per single unit
Top competitorper unit
The Commonsper unit
Annual revenue, single unit
$1.67M
$9.0M
Capacity per class
16
48
Unit EBITDA
$365K
$2.1M
Margin
13%
23%

There are other cooking classes out there. But nothing butter than The Commons.

12
The big picture

A media engine, fueled by millions of can't-miss nights.

It isn't the rooms that make this extraordinary — it's the nights inside them. Each one is a you-had-to-be-there experience: a celebrity in an apron, a chef opening their kitchen, a creator with their whole audience in the room. And there's always a new one — so guests don't come once, they come back through the year.

And each of those rooms is already a profitable business on its own.

$9.0M
Year-two unit revenue
$2.1M
Year-two unit EBITDA
~$3.2M
To open a unit
~14 mo
Payback

The plan: ten units over eight years — scaling to $105M+ in revenue and $39M in EBITDA, with the talent circulating between markets and the brands following them across the network.

13

We're building the first one in Los Angeles.

If you want to see the room before anyone else does, let's talk.