Purple Spoon Culinary Expands

A naturally born professor, who trades tweed for a navy chef’s jacket, chef Kristina San Filippo is most at home in the demo kitchen in her new culinary studio. After years of leading cooking classes at The Good Life in Naples, she decided to venture out on her own, with her passion for supporting local farmers as her guide, opening Purple Spoon Culinary in fall 2016. “Local is our priority, but sustainability goes along with it,” San Filippo says.

There is an open kitchen fronted by an attractive contemporary space filled with tables adorned with white tablecloths that jointly serve as her classroom and research lab. In addition to wine dinners and the cooking lessons (most are demonstrations, although some are hands-on), the schedule has now grown to include a weekly Wednesday produce market from 3-6 p.m. featuring whatever’s fresh at the moment from suppliers in our own backyard (last week’s harvest included orange and purple carrots, zucchini, escarole, heirloom tomatoes, tangerines and green onions, to name a few).

She also just launched in 2017 a customer-friendly expansion into lunch service and prepared foods. From Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., anyone can slide into a table at Purple Spoon and order from the weekly menu on the board and expect casual yet warm service. “We’re making a lot of things gluten-free and vegan, and for the items that do have meat, it’s from a local farm and has been humanely raised,” she says (for example, this week’s roasted turkey from Bonita’s Circle C Farm with squash, kohlrabi and broccoli). Guests can purchase any of the items to take home, too—even if it means swinging by on your way home from yoga and grabbing a container of pasta salad with trumpet mushrooms and shiitakes or bone broth to throw in the fridge.