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 — and for ten years, no one rebuilt it.
So we did.
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.
No measuring, no mess, no clean-up — just a smart, beautiful room and a night you made yourself.
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 around $143.
Every single class is filmed live. A chain of rooms becomes a media machine, producing thousands of hours a year of two kinds of content:
The talent is paid at the door — $700 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.
We'd turn a profit without publishing a single frame. We're going to publish thousands of hours.
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.
There are other cooking classes out there. But nothing butter than The Commons.
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.
The plan: ten units over eight years — roughly $42.5M in EBITDA and a $340M+ enterprise at maturity, with the talent circulating between markets and the brands following them across the network.
If you want to see the room before anyone else does, let's talk.