​​​​​​Lynn Kavanagh spends her Friday afternoons cooking. She spreads her ingredients along the large metal counter at the State Street Kitchen in Concord, picks her favorite chopping knives, ties her hair back and gets to work.

Kavanagh runs the vegan food business You’ll Eat It And Like It. She cooks a dinner and dessert combo for her customers to pick up on Fridays and spends the rest of the week baking to fill orders and serving as a personal chef for dinners and parties.

Though Kavanagh’s business is a registered LLC and she has full food safety certification, she lacks a kitchen space to accommodate her large-scale culinary endeavors. The State Street Kitchen, however, offers her not only an industrial-grade fridge and freezer alongside sprawling counter space and a host of appliances and utensils, it also provides Kavanagh with a network of similarly entrepreneurial culinary creatives and a commercial and incubator kitchen to call home.

“This is definitely the foundation of the community I was looking for,” said Kavanagh, who moved to Weare from New York in 2019.

She spent a decade working in the television and film industry before deciding to pursue her passion for cooking full-time. Food has been integral in her life since childhood. Her mother took pride in regularly baking bread, never buying it from a store, so Kavanagh’s home growing up always prioritized taste and freshness. Pivoting careers, Kavanagh became a prep cook at Magnolia Bakery before moving more into catering with the company KitchenSurfing, which brought her into contact with people eating vegan food while recovering from serious illnesses.

“I didn’t go vegan overnight, but I was watching the health benefits happen in real-time,” she said. “That definitely sparked a curiosity. Then I started looking into it more, and watching videos about factory farming and things like that, things I was completely clueless about, albeit voluntarily, and I didn’t want to be a part of that anymore.”

Her weekly recipes aim to elicit nostalgia. She draws from family favorites and puts a new spin on ingredients to make dishes vegan. Kavanagh wants her food to surprise those who taste it and inspire them to come back for more.

“There’s a lot of stigma around vegan food and cuisine, that you’re going to miss out, you’re going to be hungry, that you might just go home and eat pepperoni out of spite. So it’s difficult to work around people’s expectations when those expectations aren’t high to begin with,” she said.

From pad thai and peanut butter coconut macaroons to lion’s mane mushroom Wellington and Biscoff cheesecake, Kavanagh works to prove vegan-skeptics wrong with every recipe she makes.

“But it’s not easy to convince the fish and game and hunting capital of the world to think about all that,” she said with a chuckle.

Still building up her customer base, Kavanagh expressed gratitude to the State Street Kitchen for the support it has provided her in the six months she’s been cooking there.

Casey Neal, who helps run the kitchen, wants it to be a place for people to get their ideas off the ground. As the owner of Carousel, a catering and prepared foods company, she knows how difficult it can be to go through the process of obtaining a commercial food license, so she strives to be a shoulder to lean on for anyone cooking at the kitchen.

“I really love having an opportunity to work with different people, to watch how they do things, and to be a person that they can call when they’re in a pinch, to be able to help,” Neal said. “It’s my favorite part of doing this, being able to have this as a community resource, but also to create a space where we can all work together and bounce ideas off of each other and find opportunities for collaboration.”

The kitchen, owned by Alex Stoyle, who also owns Revelstoke, has been around for about five years. In 2023 when Neal got involved, the incubator space relaunched and began offering classes on vegan baking, fermentation, the process of obtaining a commercial food license, and more. While some people rent the space to cook or bake on a regular basis, others use it less frequently, such as for birthday parties or holiday cooking. The kitchen also hosts monthly “Drink + Draw” evenings with Pillar Gallery, located next door.

For some businesses, it’s a transitional space on the way to a permanent kitchen elsewhere, and for others it provides everything necessary for their current business models. Prior to purchasing the kitchen, Stoyle learned that it had previously served as space where a tenant would cook for a year or two before outgrowing the space and moving elsewhere. This was the case for Aissa Sweets, now located on Hall Street.

“We heard that story and thought ‘Well, what if that was the story of the kitchen all the time and had lots of tenants and were helping people get started and get their footing before they were fully launched into Concord?” Stoyle said.

Other businesses that have passed through the kitchen in recent years include Table Bakery, now in Eagle Square, and Cali Arepa, which travels the area in a food truck.

“It was important to us to give people an affordable testing ground for their concept before they go full-fledged build-out in Concord,” Stoyle said.

Both Kavanagh and Neal remarked on the collaborative nature of the kitchen and those who make use of it. For both women, it has been a transformative space.

“Something that’s really cool about the small business community and the food community in Concord is that everybody is really interconnected and willing to help each other out,” Neal said.

For information on Lynn Kavanah’s vegan food business, You’ll Eat It And Like It, visit www.eat-it-and-like-it.com. To learn more about the State Street Kitchen, visit www.statestreetkitchenconcord.com.

Rachel Wachman can be reached at rwachman@cmonitor.com