Where Are They Now: Abby Hitchcock Brings a Diverse Career Into Her Kitchen

Most of the professional chefs who run well-respected fine dining restaurants in New York City followed a fairly uniform path to the position, a steady climb up the career ladder, from restaurant to restaurant, honing their skills, palate and recipes until they were ready to run their own kitchen.

For Sag Harbor native Abigail Hitchcock, the ladder she climbed to chef and co-owner of the Greenwich Village bistro Betty and it’s adjunct, Abigail’s Kitchen, was anything but typical — and, fittingly, neither are her restaurants, where customers sometimes eat blindfolded, and the kitchen also is a training ground for aspiring amateur cooks.

The daughter of Tony Hitchcock and Judith Long, her journey from the East Hampton High School Class of 1990, heading off to college with her sights set on being a pediatrician, to running her own restaurant was more like a game of career hopscotch than climbing a ladder.

Along the way, she passed through the kitchens of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Martha Stewart, was a culinary quizmaster for the BBC, gave cooking lessons in Williams Sonoma stores and crafted hundreds recipes for Uncle Ben’s — yes, the boxed rice — and Oreo cookies.

She put in her time in restaurant kitchens and back offices, saw everything she’d built blown up by the pandemic, and then, in a New York minute, watched it all come fluttering back down into place, better than before.

“My dad was a very good cook and loved cooking gourmet meals for us at home,” Hitchcock recalled from her Manhattan restaurant last week. College in Boston led to a semester abroad in London, where she discovered she’d inherited some of dad Tony’s zest for cooking.

“I lived in what they called a self-catering flat, where you had to shop and cook for yourself. And it was really the first time in my life I’d had to cook my own meals, and I fell in love with the process of thinking about meals and buying ingredients and cooking it,” she said.

“I got so that I couldn’t wait to cook something. And then, somewhere along the line, I was getting a degree in botany … I had one of those moments where I realized that I did not love the laboratory and the scientific track I was on. What I loved was cooking. I was obsessed with it.”

She returned to the United States and enrolled — with her father’s encouragement — in the Peter Kump New York Cooking School, now known as The Institute for Culinary Education, the famed school beloved by Julia Child and renowned for its instruction in practical cooking methods.

“It was in this converted townhouse on the Upper East Side, and every morning when I would come into the building, as you went up the stairs, it had this appealing smell. You know, from the city, that was sort of a mix of gas and cleaning chemicals, and then it would slowly transition, as you went up, into the scent of butter and wine and thyme — that stays with me still today,” she said. “And I never looked back.”

After she’d finished the one-year program, she returned to England to start the hands-on post-graduate learning in real kitchens that Kump had said was where his students would best learn how to be chefs. She started with bottom-rung prep cook jobs for restaurants run by the celebrated chefs Vongerichten and Alastair Little, but also found herself in the sort of offbeat culinary jobs that would season her resume for the next several years.

She did research work for a BBC print magazine, where she was tasked with test-cooking recipes and answering readers’ letters with questions about various dishes or ingredients — like, how honey is different from sugar as a sweetener in recipes. Another gig had her cooking fish in a seafood market for customers to show off the possibilities of the product.

In 1996, Hitchcock returned to New York City, but was not drawn to the high-pressure kitchens of New York’s burgeoning fine dining world. She settled into catering and private chef-for-hire gigs, got hired to teach occasional cooking classes inside Williams Sonoma stores and helped ghostwrite cookbooks. With a recommendation from a Peter Kump classmate, she landed on the set of the “Martha Stewart Living” television show — which was filmed in Stewart’s actual home kitchen in Connecticut — as a prep cook who made the mise en place and numerous back-up versions of whatever was being cooked or baked for the show so that on-camera foul-ups did not set back filming to square one.

Then a colleague from the show presented her with a challenging, if not prestigious, culinary opportunity. A food industry advertising agency was looking for cooks to help with recipe development for its commercial brands — brands that included Nabisco, Oreo cookies, Ragu pasta sauce, Lipton soups and Uncle Ben’s rice.

“I did tons of stuff for Uncle Ben’s, like, hundreds of recipes for them that they could take to vendors and say, ‘Look what you can do with Uncle Ben’s.’ They started calling me ‘Auntie Ben’s,’” Hitchcock laughed.

“So here I am, doing recipes for these major manufacturers. The development work was interesting, I liked it for a while, but the food was pretty gross. It kind of started to get me down, working with these crappy foods.”

Happenstance would step in again. Her father and stepmother, Jean Lindgren, were regulars at a tiny Greenwich Village restaurant called Camaje, whose tiny space and focus on very refined presentation not turnover appealed to her.

The name was “stupid — it wasn’t even a word, and nobody could pronounce it,” Hitchcock scoffed in recollection — but she didn’t change it until 2019, when she’d been running Camaje for some 20 years.

What had started out as an infatuation with the tiny space, single-seating approach and glorious food had turned into a partnership, both business and personal, that ended with her predecessor in the business departing and her remaining, and retooling the restaurant in the style of her offbeat background.

The woman who had hired her to teach cooking at Williams Sonoma brought her a new twist on the idea: host real cooking classes in the restaurant’s actual kitchen. Hitchcock embraced the idea. Harking back to Peter Kump’s approach to teaching, she resolved to fold the instruction into the real-world mechanics of nightly dinner service at Camaje.

“People loved it, and the customers loved it — they got a kick out of seeing others being taught — and it sort of became our schtick: hands-on cooking in a working kitchen during dinner service.”

Then came the idea for “Dinners in the Dark,” the antithesis of the see-and-be-seen narcissism of much of New York’s dining scene in the mid-2000s.

Two nights a week, the staff would cloak the restaurant in curtains so that guests could not see inside before entering. They would be met outside and blindfolded before being led to their tables, so they were completely unfamiliar with their surroundings, even if they had visited the restaurant, sans blindfold, previously.

“The obvious thing is that when you are blindfolded, your other senses become more heightened,” she said. “To the taste of the food, sure, but also the smells and sounds and textures — you feel your wine glass differently. It’s a very different way of interacting. Everyone is just much more aware of what they are touching and sensing when they aren’t looking around the room. People on dates, they are more amorous.”

Amazingly, she says, the dinners are not a Jewish wedding of breaking glasses. People are hyper-aware of the threat of knocking something over and are more careful, the staff has found, though there are spurts of disaster and particularly klutzy guests.

In 2019, Hitchcock finally got up the nerve to rebrand Camaje – to Abigail’s Kitchen. The cooking classes and Dinners in the Dark had put the restaurant on the map. She was making appearances on the Food Network, and things were humming along.

Then the pandemic came. Closed for months, the restaurant fell far behind on its rent and struggled to find a path to working out a repayment plan with the landlord.

Serendipity again stepped in, when Hitchcock got an odd call while sitting home in lockdown, from a man looking to tap her teaching skills — to hone his at-home pie crust making technique. A year later, he called again and said he wanted to resurrect a beloved pretzel brand from his youth in a building he owned on Henry Street and needed a sidekick.

That collaboration soon blossomed into a partnership in a new restaurant in his Henry Street building – Betty, was the man’s mother – with Hitchcock as chef. Abigail’s Kitchen was reborn in the speakeasy-style basement, and Dinners in the Dark and the cooking school returned.

“It’s so perfect — it’s everything I’ve ever wanted,” Hitchcock says of her current adventure. “We use both spaces interchangeably. We do Dinners in the Dark on Wednesdays and Saturdays and the cooking classes the other nights, day classes on weekends. It’s really fun.”

But a hot potato career like Hitchcock’s seems unlikely to just be left to simmer for too long. There are ideas in the oven: a television pilot episode has already been filmed — no hints — and a cookbook is in the works.

What else?

“Beyond that, I don’t know, we shall see,” she says. “Fun food stuff.”