Cooking with Que: Detroit Restaurant Owner’s Cooking Classes Show You How to ‘Eat to Live’
Jake Newby
| 6 min read
She obviously didn’t know it at the time, but Quiana "Que" Rice’s stage 4 sarcoidosis diagnosis would change her life for the better. It sparked change in the diets of countless others, too.
“I got diagnosed when I was 29,” Rice said. “I’ll be 46 this year. All these little things that were happening were buildups that were all related to the same thing.
As she transparently illustrates in the “about” section on the website of her The Kitchen, by Cooking with Que restaurant – which hosts regular cooking courses – Rice felt like she was way too sick, way too often, for her age.
She remembers coughing like she smoked 20 packs of cigarettes a day. Her feet and ankles were swollen. She dealt with multiple sinus infections and had rashes all over her skin. When doctors recommended steroids for her sarcoidosis – an autoimmune disease that leads to tiny granulomas all over the body – she balked. Instead, she started Googling. And it didn’t take much time behind the keyboard before Rice realized her diet was the culprit.
“If you were to look up sarcoidosis, how to heal sarcoidosis – ‘cause you know we WebMD every freaking thing – everything tells you to go plant-based,” Rice said.
The idea of going vegan was too much for Rice to wrap her head around at first. She had to collect herself and take a minute to mourn her grandmother’s famous mac and cheese. But after that, Rice dove head first into an all-vegan diet.
The lifestyle change started in her own kitchen, by paying attention to labels for the first time and throwing out any and everything with shady ingredients. She stopped relying on butter and milk, laid off the sodium, ditched regular sugar and high fructose corn syrup. She relied on agave instead of honey and dates as sweeteners.
“I started looking around my kitchen asking, ‘how long did this take to get from the farm to the fork?’” Rice recalled.
Rice’s effort to cook cleaner meals inside her home quickly took on a life of its own outside of it. Just like many of her newfound ingredients, a cooking career blossomed organically for her.
“When I got diagnosed and started making these changes, I started getting all these food and diet related questions. My thing was to make a website so they could stop asking questions. Like, ‘here’s everything you need to know,’” Rice said. “So, I make the website. Soon I got a call from VegMichigan and they said, ‘oh my god, we saw your vegan mac and cheese online, why don’t you come to VegFest?’”
Rice never says “no” to an opportunity. She went to VegFest in 2016– annually Michigan’s largest vegan-friendly event – and walked away with droves of new fans.
Word of mouth about her cooking chops spread and people in her community wanted to learn how to cook and eat cleaner. She came to VegFest again in 2017, then again in 2018. Rice and her famous vegan mac and cheese popped up at every other festival in between. She was on Fox2 a few times. She put her face and her food out there constantly. All that momentum led to the opening of her downtown Detroit restaurant.
Taking pride in teaching people how to ‘eat to live.’
For a couple of years straight, Rice started at a sketch of a small kitchen surrounded by a bar of seating. In 2019, that sketch came to reality when The Kitchen, by Cooking with Que restaurant was actualized. It was part restaurant, part cooking institute. And though she’s a vegan, The Kitchen is where vegans and meat-eaters can co-exist. The multi-faceted business operates that way to this day, in addition to meal plan offerings.
Rice’s teaching foundation is based on unlearning unhealthy cooking habits that people develop while growing up.
“My biggest thing was, ‘y’all don’t even know where your food came from,’” she said. “When you shop at the grocery store, shop with some sense. Read the labels. The labels give you everything you need. When do things expire? We don’t respect expiration dates. And we don’t respect portions. I was very big on portion control, reading labels, and then not cooking like your mom and pops and your parents did. They cooked with what they had. Now we live in a whole different world. There are cleaner ways to cook.”
The Kitchen barely uses any salt, mirroring the habits of its owner. It uses fresh herbs and only sources halal chicken. There are no genetically modified organisms (GMO). And though ethically sourced meat gets a thumbs up at The Kitchen, dairy gets a thumbs down.
“We make our salad dressings, soup, salads and all, it’s all plant-based,” Rice added.
A “Que tip” she constantly shares – so much so that she made a quick Instagram tutorial out of it to really get her point across – is that you don’t have to sauté with oil.
“I am going to keep pushing this button,” she says in the video. “Today we’re going to sauté a bunch of veggies in a pan, and you know what we’re going to sauté them with? Water. It does the same thing.”
Some fan-favorites on The Kitchen menu include Que’s cauliflower wings and of course, her well-traveled vegan mac and cheese. One way you can tell she’s more concerned about helping others than getting rich is the many recipes she posts for free on her website. From her Jackfruit sliders to vegetable lasagna to vegan potato latkes, it’s all right there.
Her class vibes reflect Rice’s warm, sociable, extroverted personality. Everything is loose and fun. She’s learned that people don’t retain information otherwise.
“You feel comfortable in a learning space that makes you feel like you’re at home, number one, that’s why our kitchen looks like yours does at home,” Rice said. “So, the classes are easy. If it’s not loose, you’re not going to be comfortable, you’re not going to retain.”
Some of her clientele “cook with Que” for a fun date night idea. But she also gets a good number of “students” who genuinely want to learn the ropes of basic clean cooking.
Everything comes back to those early days in Googling and subsequently, cleaning out her pantry and refrigerator in the name of clean eating. Rice wants folks to eat to live, the same way she did to overcome sarcoidosis.
“For me, there’s nobody in the community telling people to eat to live,’” she said. “If you’re going to get tired of someone, you’re going to get tired of me, because I’m going to keep telling you to eat to live.”
The Kitchen, By Cooking with Que is at 6529 Woodward Ave. in Detroit.
Photo credit: The Kitchen, By Cooking with Que/Facebook
