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With a dash if daring

Buy gourmet cooking products from Karen West and learn how to use them from her husband, David, a chef, at the Rolling Pin Kitchen Emporium.

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published July 12, 2006

BRANDON- Onetime McDonald's executive David West fulfilled a lifelong dream when he left the burger giant at age 44 to attend a French culinary institute in New York.

Now this classically trained chef will teach cooking classes in a reincarnation of a prosperous kitchen tools "please don't call them gadgets" store that has been wife Karen's pride and joy for 12 years.

"We're mating a gourmet kitchen store with a culinary center where foodies can learn how to use everything we sell," said West, a 48-year-old former McDonald's vice president who oversaw operations of 480 fast-food stores in Florida.

The transition has been less of a culture shock than it might seem for this couple that named its pet pooch Mario Batali.

West, who worked his way up from burger flipper in high school, learned the food business inside out at McDonald's Hamburger U. He became a competent enough hobbyist cook in his spare time to cater weddings on the side. For the past year he's gathered a following at cooking classes staged at a Famous Tate's demonstration store for top-tier (read $8,000 and up) stoves for the SubZero set.

While a few stores in the Tampa Bay area offer cooking classes such as Aprons at a Publix Super Market in Citrus Park or demonstration areas such as rival Williams Sonoma, the Wests are the first local combination of a cooking implements store and full-time cooking instruction.

The opening of the couple's new Rolling Pin Kitchen Emporium by the terminus of the Crosstown Expressway extension has been delayed for months. So the Wests had to close and move out of their two Rolling Pin mall locations in WestShore Plaza and Westfield Brandon Town Center. Building inspectors flunked the exhaust system hung over the new store's flashy all-Viking exhibition kitchen, shoving the opening into late July or early August.

The couple acquired a Rolling Pin store 12 years ago when Karen decided to leave her area supervisor job at McDonald's. It had become awkward to find positions where he didn't directly supervise her without somebody relocating. So Karen, who had a business degree with an emphasis in merchandising, decided to run her own business.

"We walked past Rolling Pin and she said that was exactly the sort of store she wanted, so we bought it," said Dave. "She goes to all the trade shows, juggles relations with about 400 vendors and flat-out won't let me buy anything."

The couple later bought a second Rolling Pin in the Brandon mall.

The stores achieved sales of $400 a square foot, about a third more than the average sales productivity of a regional mall retailer. But several factors went into the decision to forsake malls for an open-air shopping center.

Malls have a tough time getting today's time-pressed shoppers to spend a few hours. So trying to get their own customers to spend even more time at Rolling Pin made more sense if they could create a destination store three times the size.

"We think we can double our sales here," Dave said. "But we could not have gotten this much space in a mall."

Inside will be all 5,200 cooking supplies found in the mall version and 800 gourmet foods such as salsa, dressings and sauces.

The store also will have demonstration areas so buyers can test whether to buy a stripped-down Capresso coffee center for $199 or one with all the bells and whistles that fetches $3,299.

In the back, West and other hired or visiting celebrity chefs on book tours can hold forth on a stage right out of Emeril Live.

The 20-foot bar featuring a 6-foot cook-top is surrounded by a dozen bar stools in a classroom that seats 30. Wall-mounted plasma TV screens air the action or the Food Network. Shoppers can watch for free from a distance to whet their appetite.

Classes will be priced at $30 for a 2-hour session with samples like the Emeril show, $40 for hands-on learning where students do the cooking and $50 for skills classes such as butchering, seafood handling and knife work.

The couple borrowed heavily from two other stores that have capitalized on the trend of Americans picking up cooking as a form of recreation: Cook's Warehouse in Atlanta and the Chopping Block in Chicago's Lincoln Park.

In Brandon Rolling Pin will be flanked by two other twists on gourmet foods: Cork & Olive and Dinner Done, a meal-assembly store for customers who want to prepare their own gourmet meals for home freezing and not have to clean up the mess.

"I loved working at McDonald's, but it got to the point where I was spending half the week in Chicago and living here," said West. "It was time to get on with another part of our lives."

Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8252.

[Last modified July 12, 2006, 07:00:50]