About

Orangerie Test Kitchen is a passion project brought to you by Eileen, Tom, Andrew, and Alex (otherwise known as the Wong family). We’ve spent the last 20+ years in Clinton, NJ mostly toggling between making food and sharing it.

We all do a lot of tinkering. Tom is an architect who plays some expert-level piano whenever he gets the chance. Andrew is also an architect; he can build just about anything out of the woodshop in our barn, and he does exactly that. He designed and built the metal pot rack in our pantry, about half of the art that hangs on our walls, and some other things that you should probably just see for yourself. Alex is the resident bread baker, graphic designer, and writer (hello!).

Eileen is the star of this show. She has been tinkering with food ever since she was making memories, and it’s readily apparent. Her time working in and managing professional kitchens for almost 20 years means that she runs a tight ship for her home functions. While she’s gotten many requests to offer cooking classes in the past, there never seemed to be a bigger reason to oblige — until now.

With the perennial popularity of food in art + culture, the benefits of being food-independent and our own ability to provide a holistic food education, we decided to offer our services. Thus, Orangerie was born.

All of the food and photography on this site are original. They are just a small part of what constitutes the creative lifestyle of tinkering that we are attempting to share with others. Our hope is that if you love food on any level — eating it, preparing it, sharing it, watching it get made, photographing it, packaging it — then you will reach out. In addition to holding classes, we often find ourselves in need of mouths to make our experiments disappear. We also hold larger functions with our students as a lesson in and of itself, and we love to use such occasions to partner with people and organizations of different crafts.

Truly, we urge anyone with a niche to pitch us their idea.