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.

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.

We reimagined the entire cooking class.

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

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

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.

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. Classes start at $69, with a blended ticket that averages around $143.

More content than Food Network. At literally zero 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:

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.

thecommons.co/recipes

Search 12,000+ recipes

All15-minuteFrom the roomCreatorsVegetarianDate night

Teddy’s Red TacosBirria tacos

Creator

Mark RoberCacio e pepe · mac ’n cheese for engineers

Dimes, NYCHarvest grain bowl

Xi’an Famous FoodsSpicy cumin noodles

République, LAGrilled chicken Caesar

Kismet, LACrispy rice bowl

12,480 recipes and counting — every dish from every room, free to watch and cook.

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

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 night — 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 pure upside.

Each city becomes a hub — talent flows in, content flows out.

Los Angeles first, then New York, Austin, Miami, and San Francisco. Each room draws in the chefs, restaurants, creators, and audiences of its city — and turns those nights into thousands of hours of content for the whole network.

Five cities, one engine — every room feeding the same audience and the same growing library.

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.

One room becomes a network. $3M to $91M 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.

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.

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.

We've built a one-of-a-kind culinary venue before.