Cooking Classes and Beyond
By Naperville Magazine
Appears in the April 2026 issue.
By Peter Gianopulos
Clarify Kitchen offers tutorials, tastings, workshops, and event space
Back in 2021, Cindy Hyett worried she might run out of room. Would there be enough space for everything to fit? This wasn’t a U-Haul kind of dilemma—not a question of square footage but of cohesion. Could a lifetime of culinary passions and ambitions—cooking, catering, tasting, teaching, exploring—amicably coexist in one business under one roof?
Today, that question has been answered. Hyett’s newly opened culinary venture, Clarify Kitchen (1701 Quincy Ave., Naperville), defies simple labels. It’s part cooking workshop, part culinary discovery center, part community gathering place. Imagine a deeply personalize riff on Sur La Table, minus the kitchen gadgets for sale.
At Clarify Kitchen, Hyett teaches hands-on cooking classes that range from simple weekday meal prep to more advanced tutorials where guests make some of her signature offerings: mini pot pies, Spanish tapas, and artisan breads.
No two days will look the same. Sommeliers, cheesemongers, and caterers might drop by to host tastings or workshops. There are date-night events where couples can snack on charcuterie boards while playing naughty bingo or taking cocktail classes. In the summer, Hyett will lead culinary camps where kids can grow their own produce, taste exotic foods, and learn heat-and-boil basics. And then there’s the space itself, which can be rented out for baby showers, celebrations, and corporate events—with optional catering, of course, from Hyett’s sister business, BusyButternut Catering.
She can’t help but feel that all of her passions and career pivots have been leading her toward this venture. Teaching runs in her blood; both her mom and maternal grandmother were educators. Her maternal grandfather, one of General Patton’s drivers during World War II, worked as a furniture maker at the Kohler factory on Fifth Avenue. Her father, the announcer of the Naperville Memorial Day and Labor Day parades for decades, built a career in finance and asset management. She grew up, like so many children of her generation, on a basic diet of boxed mac and cheese and peanut butter sandwiches. She dreamed of seeing the world, and PBS became her passport. She recorded every episode of the culinary travel series Made in Spain hosted by chef José Andrés and watched them on an endless loop. “To this day,” she says, “I still have those VHS tapes.”
Eventually, she did see the world. Her interest in fitness landed her a job training Secret Service agents in the White House in 2002. Later, working as a traveling software instructor, she grazed her way through Dubai, Singapore, Australia, and beyond. “I couldn’t get my hands on enough food—crazy foods, weird foods. I feel in love with it all,” she says. That curiosity inspired her to leave her job and study at Le Cordon Bleu in Las Vegas, training she parlayed into work as a private chef on a yacht and then the launch of BusyButternut in 2012.
While she’d achieved her goal of cooking professionally, she longed to teach again. She missed Naperville, too—the people, the community, the nonprofits, and its unique sense of connection. Which is what kick-started the quest to launch Clarify Kitchen.
What’s her definition of success? Only an analogy will suffice. To celebrate a recent birthday, Hyett rewatched every Made in Spain episode she owned, then mapped out a Spanish vacation around Andrés’s stops. She feasted on tapas, drank Cava, chatted with artisan producers, and gleaned a few cooking tips along the way. That’s what she hopes Culinary Kitchen will be: a culinary portal that encourages guests to fall as deeply in love with food as she did on that trip. “I am a teacher,” she says, “Food just happens to be my area of focus.”
Photos: Greg Mulvey
