When Darin Bresnitz and his twin brother, Greg, set out to locate a studio for the Sam Mason–starring IFC show Dinner With the Band, they couldn’t find the space they needed: “For our budget, there wasn’t really one that we could afford,” Darin tells us. So the pair decided to create their own. The resulting year-old venue, called the Rising Tide, is a 1,200-square-foot two-story space with a customizable kitchen set, a separate prep kitchen, and editing capacity on premises. The brothers now rent it out for filming, as well as product demos, cooking classes, and the like. Until recently it was hard for burgeoning food entrepreneurs to find such spaces. No more, with the unveiling of a few new options.
According to Jamie Tiampo of See Food Media, which encompasses food-video site Eat TV, the popularity of food television and video has led to a dearth of places to get all those reels filmed. Tiampo is banking so much on others clamoring to make culinary videos that he’s just opened a three-kitchen studio (with an additional rooftop barbecue set) that’s “all digital, tapeless,” he says. The professional photographer has worked on both still and video shoots, and he attests that “most of the time you’re fighting the actual physical space.” So Tiampo tried to minimize this: The three kitchens each have customizable looks, there are front-facing ovens for easy filming, non-reflective countertops, and even a “scullery” to keep dishwashing separate. One kitchen has a sliding door, to serve as a closed-off, soundproof prep kitchen. Since the studio and events space opened last month, the Food Network has already filmed a reality show on premises, and CBS and AOL have also been clients.
See Food Media isn’t the only one that’s caught on the need for versatile culinary cum food-video spaces. The Kitchen NYC is a new “culinary venue” that can do still and video shoots in its slick commercial kitchen set (a residential set will debut in June), and can also host dinners, cocktails parties, cooking classes, catering prep, and more. So far it’s been used by Hidden Valley Ranch, who hosted an Angie Harmon–led cooking demo for kids, and we just received an invite for a Tsunami benefit at the venue, hosted by Ty Ku sake. So if Gwyneth ever starts that food magazine, she has a few more options for where to hold the launch party — or, at the very least, a place to film one of the singing-Gwyneth Campbell’s Soup infomercials that now seem inevitable.
