Chef Alex Pope on whole pigs and three hours at Momofuku

Many learn to cook from their family. But not every family is responsible for teaching cooks. Alex Pope comes from one of those rare families, wherein cooking is simply a part of life.

And while he didn’t know that he would end up as the 28-year-old executive chef at R Bar in Kansas City, Pope did know that for close to 40 years, his last name had been synonymous with cooking in the Midwest. His paternal grandparents, Antoinette and Francois Pope, ran the Pope School of Cooking in Chicago. They put out a series of Italian cookbooks and even embraced a new technology at the time, television, with their own cooking show.

“I don’t know if they were actually the first chefs to cook on television,” Pope says. “I know they were the first in our family.”