annsmartschool.com Reviews 7

Rethink the model of the ‘live stream’ classes! Poorly organised and I am disappointed.

I received an email before with an ingredients list and method. Great!

Started prepping all my ingredients an hour before.

In the booking instructions It noted I should expect to receive a link to the stream 30 mins ahead of the session. This did not come so I followed up and then received something 10 mins late, which then took me to a 4 year old Vimeo video of the cooking classes.

I wouldn’t mind paying extra for access to a pre-recorded class but 1) why did I have to give up my Saturday evening to wait for a link I could have accessed at any time 2) it would be better to make me aware before the class that instead of a live stream it would be a prerecorded class, instead of noting in the booking instructions there might be a chance the video is pre-recorded and 3) I could have just gone to YouTube?

The video didn’t explain measurements so I found myself flicking between tabs of the video and recipe and ended up giving up with the video.

End result was a nice meal. So, if I were you, I’d upload the videos to YouTube. You would get better reach, probably more money and less annoyed customers!

Extremely disappointing.
If you’re expecting to cook your own food and do all the preparations yourself, you’re in for a big surprise! We naively thought we would chop, cut, stir and do all the preparations for our own Paella dish. But with 16 people sharing the preparations, myself and my partner got less than 10 minutes, the same for most people (although some got a lot more). As for the food, it wasn’t great. A complete waste of £250.

Tapas class with Andy 8-3-2025
Absolutely fantastic - we learned so much and felt involved in trying different cooking skills out .
Andy was welcoming and helpful and made the class fun and informative and we loved trying the tapas at the end .
Perfect venue , the time went so fast and we feel inspired and will think about another class in the future .
Highly recommended and came out feeling excited to try new dishes out .

Strictly speaking, the school has upheld it's own small print (hence two stars, not one), but the request made under extenuating circumstances (elderly parent care situation) to move our class, a) didn't get addressed until prompted, and b) was met with a cursory response to 'read the rules' and 'pay up' if you want to move your class, and only to a precise date, not a time bounded (e.g. 3 or 6 months) period

Great 2 hours with Andy cooking thai food, loved it, so much knowledge passed on, and general hints and tips outside of making 3 thai dishes. I've seen a few comments about not doing all the steps yourself, instead you'd do certain things, then someone else would, anyway so impressed went back and booked 8 more sessions

Barely did any cooking, only one batch of food is prepared amongst the entire group which means you spend practically all your time watching others. The shape of the tables meant that it was very hard to hear what was going on and the instructor, whilst very nice, was very quiet and lost her audience.

We didn't feel like we learnt any new skills or anything new about cooking Thai food.

There was no air extraction in what was quite a small room which meant it got very steamed up and our clothes really smelt of the food. The mask policy was ridiculous, you don't need to wear a mask when sat down really close to others, but when you get up to cook and are further away from others you do!

The whole thing just felt like a rip off for the money. We have done other cooking courses before which offered so much more.

My partner and I were bought a live online course at Ann's Smart School of Cookery (here on referred to as ASSoC) from a relative via Virgin Experience Days. Booking our "Live Stream Event" via the ASSoC website was relatively painless.

We picked "Crispy Crab Fritters with Aioli" at 11:00 on a Saturday. We were emailed the list of ingredients beforehand, so made sure to buy and prep them in advance.

On the day, we received an email 30 minutes before it started from ASSoC saying that this would be a pre-recorded class instead of a live one, due to low numbers, but that "but Ann is here to answer any questions via the link".
I was pretty disappointed to read this, but figured we'd make the best of it.
In this email, we were given a link to the pre-recorded video, and a password with which to access it.

11:00 came and went, the password didn't work. I copy-pasted the password from the email. I checked my browser cookies, tried from multiple different browsers, with no success.
I emailed ASSoC back about the problem at 11:03, left a comment on the locked, un-viewable video at 11:10, and then left them a voicemail at 11:17.
As far as we could tell, there was literally no one on hand to ensure that this "Live Stream Event" we'd paid for would go ahead as advertised.

To make the best of a bad situation and to not waste our ingredients, we decided to just make the fritters and aioli to the best of our ability using the list of ingredients which also included a loose recipe. I say "loose", because there are multiple ingredients listed which aren't used anywhere in the recipe itself.

ASSoC got back to me at 19:57 that evening, almost 9 full hours after the event should have started.
Here is a verbatim line from their email:
"Apologies you has issues. We did check and it works ok from here. Your system maybe blocking it."
Useless, 9 hours after the fact.

TL;DR
Ann's Smart School of Cookery's "Live Stream Events" seem like a scam.
Bad quality recipe writing, zero live support. Avoid at all costs.