Abigail Hitchcock

From the East End to the kitchen.

Abby Hitchcock grew up on Long Island’s rural East End, known for its fishing and farming—fresh bay scallops, stripers, flounder, bluefish, farm stands, and pick-your-own strawberries, pumpkins, and apples. From her mother, she learned to love simple, fresh, local foods. From her father, an amateur chef who enjoyed preparing American and ethnic feasts, she inherited a love of reading menus and preparing exotic fare.

Food became the thing.

It wasn’t until she attended university in England, where she was placed in a “self-catering” flat—shop, cook, and feed yourself—that Abby realized food was her passion: shopping for it, cooking it, eating it, researching it. She began poking around greengrocers and butcher shops and preparing ambitious meals for her English flatmates, from a New York brunch to an American Thanksgiving for twelve, all from a tiny kitchenette.

After earning her Botany degree, she returned to the States and enrolled in Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School, now The Institute of Culinary Education.

A career built around food.

With her Peter Kump diploma in hand, Abby went on to work at The Tea Box at Takashimaya in New York, Vong in London, and at the BBC’s Vegetarian Good Food Magazine. She has been a private chef, worked with Martha Stewart, and run her own catering company. She eventually settled down as owner of Abigail’s Kitchen, formerly Camaje, in Greenwich Village.

Betty and Abigail’s Kitchen.

In 2022, having weathered the pandemic and twenty-five years on MacDougal Street, Abby moved Abigail’s Kitchen to the Lower East Side. The move came after meeting someone who took one of her cooking classes in 2020 and later became her business partner. Together, they opened Betty, an American restaurant located in the same building at 193 Henry Street, with Abigail’s Kitchen on the lower level.

While Betty focuses on a homey menu that includes all-day breakfast, Abigail’s Kitchen continues to offer hands-on cooking classes, private events, and its signature Dinners in the Dark.

Teaching, tasting, and television.

A certified sommelier, Abby also conducts wine tastings in which wines are paired with complementary foods.

She hosts Dinners in the Dark—sensory feasts served to blindfolded diners—twice a week, the only such dinners in New York City. Featured in New York and national media, Dinners in the Dark feature Abby’s secret menus and other sensory “happenings” and have drawn countless diners in search of an eating adventure.

Abby has been a contestant on Food Network’s Chopped! and has served as a judge on Beat Bobby Flay more than 25 times.