Food is Irene Baker’s life. She has worked as a food server, bartender, host, and even dishwasher. She has also owned and managed restaurants, and she now owns her own catering company.
Her love affair with food began at an early age, when she helped her aunt cater parties. “I was in the kitchen as soon as I was old enough to hold a knife,” Baker said. Her whole family wound up in the food industry. Of four sisters, three are caterers and one works in the hospitality industry.
Baker relies on her family’s recipes and her inherited sense of what tastes good. Of course she has tips.
“Use the freshest ingredients you can get,” she said on how to make real Italian food.
Naturally, she’s not talking about grocery-store fresh. Baker again goes back to family traditions and has a huge herb garden that she grows just to use in her cooking.
“My grandfather always had a garden,” she said. Her grandfather taught her another passion. He brought grapes from Italy to make his own wine, and that is Baker’s second love.
“My grandfather even kept barrels in the basement and every night before dinner my mom went downstairs and siphoned a little off the top to serve,” she said. Although Baker does not make her own wine, she can talk for days about the characteristics in her favorite varietals and what tastes great with them. She lived in California for years and fondly remembers going on winery tours with her sisters.
Baker’s family is so much a part of her identity that she couldn’t imagine denying her sons that same privilege.
“I still smell my grandmother’s kitchen cooking,” Baker said, with a deep breath inward, as though the marinara sauce is simmering in the next room. Her grandmother, who immigrated to the United States from Naples, Italy, helped Baker raise her two sons.
“I had British nannies look after the children, and my grandmother looking after them,” she said. Baker has always loved working in the restaurant industry and usually had two or three jobs. Instead of hiring a babysitter or sending her sons to daycare, Baker opted for a more personal approach. It was also a way for her children to experience more cultures and be more open-minded, she said.
All that spirit and love for life is too much to hold Baker down in one place. She loves to travel to get inspiration for dishes, and to soak up other customs, she said. Baker lives in Rehoboth Beach during the summer and moves around in the winter. For the last three years, she’s visited friends in Florida. This year she is off to California, where her family now lives, to teach cooking classes with a friend who owns a cooking school.
There isn’t much Baker hasn’t tried. She has a knack at turning her loves into businesses because she doesn’t want to spend her time on things she doesn’t feel passion for.
“I tried a desk job and I hated it. I stuck it out for three months and I said I would never do it again,” Baker said. After her stint as a receptionist, Baker decided to embrace what she really wanted to do.
She moved to Rehoboth about nine years ago to work at La La Land. Baker also used to be one of the owners of Sandwiches on the Beach deli in Rehoboth Beach, but she sold her shares to open a catering business. “I loved it there, but I didn’t like doing the same food all the time,” she said. Now she manages La La Land and concentrates on cooking a wide variety of foods for parties, weddings or other events.
“I can do the whole enchilada,” she said with a laugh. Still, enchiladas really aren’t her specialty. Instead, Baker loves to cook the Italian food she grew up with and knows best.
“I’m Italian,” she said. Cooking was such a part of growing up that she carries memories of tasting true Italian recipes with her wherever she goes, from the East Coast to the West Coast and in between.
Baker said she plans to stay in Rehoboth Beach during summers for many, many years enjoying fine wine, good food and friends who share her passion for epicurean delights.
