For decades, Sarah Mastracco moved through top chef kitchens from Tuscany to Manhattan and San Francisco, mastering stations, chasing adrenaline and helping pioneer the food-TV revolution that reshaped how America cooks at home.
Now she’s rooted that experience on First Street in Greenport, where Flavor Fork offers a distilled version of everywhere she’s been. The walls of her gourmet shop are lined with jars of her homemade sauces, neatly stacked soups and salads and local products she hand-picks from fellow East End gourmands.
In an adjoining kitchen she teaches cooking classes. A recent evening class ended with a group of student chefs twirling fresh pasta and Bolognese they’d made together. She said she’s having a lot of fun with the classes.
“I’m going to really lean into that this winter,” she said, “and amp it up and just see if people are interested, because it’s so much fun, and after all these years, I feel like I do have some wisdom to share and some fun kitchen tricks.”
Her route to this small grab-and-go shop ran through the hills of Tuscany, some of the most demanding kitchens in international cuisine, through television studios and finally to the North Fork, where she and her husband moved full time in 2020.
After college, Mastracco and a few friends drove west on a whim and landed in San Francisco, where she ended up enrolling in the California Culinary Academy. A classmate had some good advice: “The only way to really get good is to go get a restaurant job.”
Soon she was working the oyster station in an open kitchen at the San Francisco restaurant Farallon, building towers of shellfish and shucking 400 oysters a night. Constantly in the weeds, constantly stressed — and thrilled. “It was insane … but it was so much fun.”
After culinary school she went to work at a five-star hotel in San Gimignano, a medieval hilltop town in Tuscany. The team was just three — chef, sous and Mastracco — and the work was “hands-on cooking for Italians.” She studied grammar during lunch breaks.
While she was in Italy, she read an article about Jody Williams, a star chef at New York City’s Il Buco, and sent a fax asking for a chance to work there. She got the job, but in a twist of fate fit for a reality TV cooking show, she reached Manhattan two weeks after Williams left the restaurant. So she did what cooks do when a plan collapses, and pivoted.
At New York’s Mesa Grill, she met chef Bobby Flay and passed a tryout. The volume was punishing and the learning curve was steep. One day the wheels came off.
She was expediting — calling tickets while also cooking on her station — when the boss popped by at the worst possible moment. With Flay approaching, the order tickets she was expediting “were feeding so fast that they actually started going into the trash can.”
Flay looked at her and asked if she knew what she was doing.
“Absolutely,” she replied.
She told the team to start cooking everything on their stations and muscled through. The point, in her telling, was the discipline forged by repetition: You stayed at a kitchen station “longer than you thought you should because you needed to perfect it,” and after a few weeks you’re good enough to train the next person and move up.
Through some of New York’s finest restaurants — Mesa Grill, Le Bernardin, Eleven Madison Park — she progressed, stations by station, until she’d mastered each one. Then came another pivot.
Mastracco moved to the other side of the house with Union Square Hospitality Group in Manhattan, helping open Blue Smoke as a manager and absorbing restauranteur Danny Meyer’s approach to hospitality. Then it was back to San Francisco, where she served as a family’s private chef, and joined Williams-Sonoma’s test kitchen, developing simmer sauces, cake batters and other recipes.
In 2007, a friend called from New York; Martha Stewart’s new cooking show was retooling its kitchen team. Mastracco flew east, cooked for the team and interviewed with Stewart while the host was getting her hair done.
“She was getting her hair blow-dried and could not hear me,” Mastracco recalled with a laugh, the two of them mouthing words to each other in the mirror. She got the job, and for five seasons she found herself in a role she loved.
After the show ended, she went on to her own producing, script work and development. She joined PBS and Food Network projects that dropped teams into a location for weeks: “Pati’s Mexican Table” in Mexico and Bethesda, “Trisha’s Southern Kitchen” in Nashville, “Farmhouse Rules” in the Hudson Valley. She said she thrived on the rhythm and the travel.
In 2014, she met and began dating her future husband, Jonathan Baker. She kept traveling whenever her shows were on hiatus — spending a month in Bali, Croatia or Italy whenever she wasn’t working. Along the way she worked on teams that won Emmys and James Beard Awards, and has been nominated on her own several times.
She’s worked with a variety of chefs, celebrities and other influencers and said her on-set method is always the same: thorough preparation. Walk the host through the process and aim for a seamless experience, but be ready for curve balls.
Working with hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg offered a twist she admired: He “never wanted swaps,” insisting, “I want to cook my own food … in real time on camera.” When there’s time, she prefers that too. “It looks better and it smells better.”
In 2019 she accepted a job with Food Network’s new digital arm as the company launched a fresh app and series of live demos. Then the world shut down.
“When the pandemic hit, it just went belly up,” she said of the network’s digital launch.
She was five months pregnant when she flew home to New York from a two-week shoot in Austin in March, 2020. The next day, she and Baker moved into their Cutchogue home full time.
She and a neighbor, Dr. Emily McDonald, started building a wellness “challenge” app and, to support it, Mastracco began cooking plant-forward prepared meals for pickup. She would post weekly menus online. Customers ordered and drove to a little barn on her property, where a small fridge held their takeout orders. The seeds of Flavor Fork sprouted during that long stretch of isolation.
“I guess I didn’t overthink it,” she said. “I just did it.”
Opening the shop was hectic, she said, but a close friend who had run a specialty food store for two decades walked her through the distributor maze, product curation and online sales.
Mastracco said she’s been gratified by the pace of sales, both her own products and local items like Milla’s Puffs yuca sticks, Blackbird granola from Shelter Island and Nick B’s Chimichurri.
Mastracco has a lot on her plate: retail, e-commerce, cooking classes, catering, her husband’s adjoining Formworks Architecture studio and workspace and a young daughter.
She laughed when asked how she keeps all those plates spinning.
“I don’t know if I am … that is to be determined.”
Flavor Fork is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays.