Instructor Bio

Hello, I am Chef Mackenzie! I consider myself a passionate scholar of world cuisines. I have an AA degree in Spanish from City College, studied Latin American Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, attended the Cordon Bleu Culinary School in Paris and have taken continuing education classes at the Culinary Institute of America. I have worked in restaurants and food establishments in the Bay Area for the last 30 years. One of my current jobs is working as a chef at Hand's on Gourmet helping to run team building cooking parties in a beautiful kitchen in the Dogpatch. My last full-time gig in the kitchen was working as the savory chef at Mission Pie in San Francisco for 6 years. I also worked at the Hayes Street Grill and Restaurant Carta in San Francisco and was the first chef at the Headland鈥檚 Center for the Arts in the Marin Headlands. A project very dear to my heart is La Cocina Community Kitchen which I helped to launch as the as its first Program and Kitchen Manager. My long and eclectic cooking career includes stints as a breakfast line cook, delicatessen production cook, sushi chef, pastry chef and culinary instructor and culinary tour guide. I am super proud of raising bi-cultural, bilingual son in the Mission District who is currently in graduate school working on a PhD in Physics!