During a recent tour of the soon-to-be former America’s Test Kitchen headquarters in Brookline, test kitchen manager Meri Lippard offered to show me the control room. “Sure,” I responded, and expected to be led into a room buzzing with video production monitors, maybe a couple sound boards, dormant boom mics, tripods.
Instead, the small, L-shaped room, adjacent to the main kitchen, was lined with a few top-opening chest freezers, and Metro racks (moveable, steel shelving) stacked with a couple dozen pressure cookers, and rows and rows of extra “common stock” ingredients—shared bags of flour, cans of tomatoes, etc.
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But it’s the improbably named “control room” that best exemplifies the company’s need for new digs. To me, it appears to be a pantry. But for three weeks every spring, it becomes an actual “control room,” with blinking monitors and other equipment used to film*America’s Test Kitchen, the PBS show, in the kitchen next door.
