AnastasiaWorrell

Anastasia Worrell is a plant-based culinary educator with more than 15 years in the restaurant industry. As the founder and former owner of The Green House, Wilmington's first fine-dining vegan restaurant, she built her career mastering the art of plant-based cuisine. She opened the restaurant in 2021, ran it for five years and sold it in 2026. Today, she uses that professional expertise to bring cooking back to everyone, teaching that cooking is not an art reserved for a select few, but a practical, joyful skill.

Anastasia's anti-recipe philosophy centers on intuition: enjoying food is better than sticking to a recipe. She teaches the foundational restaurant practices and cross-generational wisdom that make daily cooking pleasurable, fast and effortless. When guests kept asking how to make the restaurant's dishes at home, she began teaching weekly classes, which grew into The Green House School. The school has hosted 22 sessions for everyday cooks from across the East Coast, helping them rebuild their relationship with food, connect with local, seasonal whole foods, and use home cooking as an expression of self-care, love and community connection.

Anastasia holds an MBA and is a longtime vegan. She is now co-writing The Best of The Green House, a cookbook of the restaurant's most-requested recipes, with Chef Dexter Spencer, who trained at the vegan restaurant Farm Spirit in Portland, Oregon.

For much of human history, cooking knowledge was passed naturally from one generation to the next: how to stock a kitchen, build flavor, use what is available, make meals stretch, prepare food efficiently and gather people around the table. Today, many people have access to more recipes, ingredients and food content than ever before, yet often feel disconnected from the fundamental skills that make cooking feel simple and enjoyable.

To Anastasia, smart restaurant practices aren't commercial secrets. They are rooted in the age-old culinary traditions that once belonged in every home kitchen. She bridges the gap between commercial efficiency and daily life, helping everyday cooks reclaim these lost traditions, save time and bring intuitive cooking back to the center of the household.

Through cooking classes, culinary education programs, retreats and speaking engagements, Anastasia translates the wisdom of restaurant kitchens and generations of everyday cooks into approachable tools for modern life. Her work draws on the world's diverse culinary traditions, showing that delicious everyday cooking does not need to be complicated, time-consuming or intimidating.