Ditch traditional birthday parties for these cooking lessons around Johannesburg

Rally the troops for a tailored and interactive food creation fiesta in a fully equipped social kitchen. Under the guidance of a professional chef, you and your friends get hands-on cooking classes that allow you to create the most unifying birthday memories. The global menu selection for your special day includes Greek, Mexican, Italian/Sicilian, Brazilian, Moroccan and Indian. However, if you’re feeling the indigenous spirit and want an African experience, you may want to try this.

Cost: R750.00 to R780.00 per person

It’s not only adults who sometimes crave an extraordinary birthday experience. Kushinda in Roodepoort offers dedicated birthday celebration packages for kiddies as well as teenagers. While their birthday packages are specifically tailored for younger foodies, adults can leverage private sessions for their birthdays through Kushinda’s Caterers Academy, and pricing is on a case-by-case basis. Just like Onezwa, your young ones prepare, mix, cook or bake their own meals from scratch under the watchful eye of professional chefs. If there are any cupcakes or biscuits on the menu, they decorate these themselves as well.

Chef Rany Jo, who is the founder of Umami Food Studio, curates birthday celebrations that entail immersive Asian culinary masterclasses. Instead of all the guests cooking individually, he sets up a communal kitchen where everyone cooks collaboratively as a team. 

Everything unfolds at his high-end private home studio Maison Umami, and the intimate sessions only accommodate a minimum of 8 and maximum of 14 guests at a time. Your friend group may select one of these menu options: Korean Fried Chicken & Bao, Traditional Dim Sum & Dumplings, Thai Street Food & Summer Feasts or Modern Sushi & Poke.

Cost: From R950 to R1,350+ per person

Culinary artist Chef Noni’s specialty is indigenous food. Her experiential birthday cooking lessons are offered through her teaching platform Noni's Home Dish. The action happens at her residential home studio where she gives you a full-fledged cultural experience that integrates traditional storytelling into a hands-on cooking masterclass. The menu is a vegan, plant-based Pan-African heritage cuisine that kicks off with raw ingredient preparation, advances toward a collective multi-dish cooking lesson and ends in a seated communal feast.

Cost: R2,200 per adult

Bookings: @ @zulustarrischefnoni across all social media platforms

This establishment’s inclusive offering for cooking classes stretches beyond adult and children’s birthdays and even includes anniversaries and workshops. But because your birthday is all about you, they leave it up to you to decide whether you want to explore baking, pastry making or general cooking. All the classes are hands-on, with the children’s menu including chicken wraps and brownies. What makes the adult offering even more fun is the competitiveness, because you and your friends work in teams to create the five-course meal, going up against each other as each team is assigned a specific course.

Cost: Around R1,500 per person, children around R180 to R250

Bookings: WhatsApp +27 72 678 8407

This Parkwood establishment hosts adult birthday cooking classes at its primary kitchen across 12 individual cooking stations with professional chefs, and children's cooking and baking parties take place in a fully supervised studio space. When you walk through this high-end recreational culinary school’s adult hosting space’s French doors, you are led straight to a patio, an infinity pool and a herb garden.

The adults create a customised three-course harvest-style meal including a high-end protein of either seared beef fillet, fresh fish or chicken as well as sides. Children get to immerse themselves in chocolate making, cupcake crafting or cake decorating, and they don’t eat all their creations at once but are offered a take-home box.

Cost: Children R450, adults R880 per person, each with a minimum of 10 people

Whether the birthday girl, boy or non-binary person is a child or adult, this will still be a chef-led social cooking event. Not only do the guests enjoy a social cooking experience, but they also get to listen to music and eat the prepared food in a communal, shared-table dining setting.

The children’s offerings are curated to also be educational about basic kitchen safety, hygiene and confidence. You can go to town at the Culinary Loft because there’s no pre-set menu, but you get to customise yours however you like, with the option to also include a professional photographer, custom floral/table decor or a birthday cake at an extra cost.

Cost: Adults from R450 per person and from R350 per child

Adult birthday parties are evening affairs where welcome drinks set the tone, the chef does a culinary introduction and then it’s all hands on deck. Children’s cooking lessons, on the other hand, are styled as age-appropriate recipes and themes.

The birthday menus are derived from international dishes like Thai/Asian, Mexican Fiestas, Moroccan, French or Italian cuisine. Once the guests are done creating their dishes from scratch, the food is presented on a communal buffet/harvest table to be enjoyed as a collective feast.

Cost: R650 per adult, children’s birthdays are custom quote-based

Bookings: [email protected]