Culinary insight at Three Sisters
Downtown kitchen to promote food-based economic expansion
Foodies, entrepreneurs, culinary students and people who are just plain hungry, will soon have a new Downtown location to eat, learn and play.
Anzia Bennett, founder of Three Sisters Kitchen and with the assistance of Downtown Albuquerque Mainstreet, has leased a roughly 5,000-squarefoot space on Gold and 1st SW to launch a new food concept.
The Three Sisters Kitchen will be a nonprofit community space to promote culinary economic development, said Bennett. “The idea was really to build a community food space that creates opportunities for community members to engage in the local food system in a lot of different ways.”
Three Sisters Kitchen isn’t just another restaurant, although it will serve food. The space will be divided into four spaces, each with a different goal.
One will be a “local food shop and cafe,” with healthy food offerings from local New Mexican growers and chefs, she said. It will also contain a space for merchandising. Bennett is working with local health-care providers who want their patients to eat healthier food.
The second space will be a community classroom, which will be dominated by a demonstration kitchen. It will offer cooking classes and allow people to test out home recipes. “(It’s) a place to come learn healthy cooking strategies, fun cooking techniques, really just bringing people together,” Bennett said.
There also will be a community dining room for events, and it will offer a “cookbook library,” Bennett said.
Another space will be home to a test kitchen for aspiring chefs. It will feature commercial equipment and allow potential chefs and restaurant owners to test recipes before opening a restaurant. “It’s a really low-risk way to enter the market.”
Three Sisters Kitchen is named after the “three sisters” of the gardening world — corn, beans and squash, which thrive when planted together. Bennett said she wants her kitchen to function in the same way.
“What we are super-excited about is identifying the needs of those folks with great ideas with no
capital and really supporting them,” she said.
Three Sisters Kitchen will begin its remodel in the coming weeks and is scheduled to open early next year, according to Bennett. “We want to get open in time for all of the awesome stuff in New Mexico during the growing season,” she said.