Deon Foster spun through a whirlwind of duty stations in her 20s and 30s as the wife of a Marine aviator. Through them all, cooking remained her north star. No matter where in the world she landed—Oahu, Yokota, Stuttgart—she was always at home in the kitchen.
“Even when I was a child in Baltimore, I’d take mesh and sieve mud like it was gravy for mashed potatoes,” she recalled. “Without lumps.”
That playtime presaged Foster’s considerable career at the Kitchen Koop, the gourmet shop she opened in Olde Towne Portsmouth in 1998, catering to avid at-home chefs and pros with top-of-the-line equipment, gadgets, and goods as well as classes that could coax culinarians out of kitchen klutzes and ramp up connoisseurs’ repertoires…