Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Fine Utensils: Willow Glen's Cooking Etc. is home to high-end kitchen utensils, cookware, appliances and linens, including some of the classiest salt-and-pepper shakers and grinders around.
Cooking Etc. offers even more choices to area chefs
By Jim Aquino
Barbi Satter, co-owner of the Willow Glen cookware store Cooking Etc., is feeling a bit numb after a busy, hectic holiday season for her store. But she's pleased that her business brought smiles to the faces of holiday customers who were about to feel like the cookware-shopping equivalent of George Bailey in the third act of It's a Wonderful Life.
Satter, a homemaker and former administrative assistant who runs the four-year-old Meridian Avenue shop with longtime friend Dean Sales, recounts what she calls "horror stories," in which desperate shoppers came to Cooking Etc. for help because the cooking supplies they ordered online didn't arrive in time for Christmas.
"I had three people come in over the holidays, just in tears. We were able to put together the same package for less money, and they were thrilled," Satter says. "One gal was just in tears because what she ordered never got there. During the holidays, that's not what you want happening. If you order a gift, you want to be sure it's going to get to whomever you ordered it for."
Satter says interaction with the customers--like making sure that they receive the holiday gift they ordered--has disappeared from the retail arena in the last 10 years and Cooking Etc. is attempting to fill that void by providing the kind of service they can't get elsewhere.
"We have all the services a big cookware store has, but we're just a little mom-and-pop store. We're finding people are really hungry for that hometown feeling," Satter says. "We've tried to build our reputation on really good customer service. It's very important for us to greet our customers, make them feel comfortable, and let them wander and sip on a cup of cappuccino while they're walking around."
Cooking Etc. sells high-end kitchen utensils and cookware, appliances, ceramics and linens. The store also presents demonstrations of their products.
"We have a gentleman who comes in twice a year to sharpen knives, usually around Easter and before Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's been a huge hit," Satter says. "We also have had garnishing demonstrations and sushi demos."
Satter says that in the New Year, she's going to work on bringing cookbooks back to the store. Satter and Sales stopped selling cookbooks a few years ago because customers were buying them on the Internet instead.
The shop itself was an idea that came from Sales, an expert in gourmet cooking. Satter, whose husband, John, served in the Air Force with Sales during the '60s, helped him realize his dream.
"That's where the 'Etc.' came in. I'm the 'Etc.'" says Satter, whose forte is gift making and packaging, while Sales is very knowledgeable in the cooking equipment department. "I call Dean 'Heavy Metal Man.'"
Some customers initially thought Satter and Sales were married to one another, but then they would meet her husband, who sometimes works at the store.
"John is my real husband, and I call Dean my store husband," Satter says.
Cooking Etc. has everything for those who either know their way around the kitchen or don't at all, like those customers who have to learn how to cook by making soup.
"We have gone to the extra effort to find things like gourmet soups in which all you do is add water," Satter says. "I say to them, 'Nobody needs to know that this came out of a package. Take all the credit you want.'"
Cooking Etc., 1712-H Meridian Ave. Open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed on Sundays. For more information, call 408.266.5382.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
