(COLORADO SPRINGS) — When he isn’t wowing taste buds, local celebrity, Chef Brother Luck, is pushing the culinary boundaries and inspiring large audiences across the nation – starting here in Colorado Springs with cheeseburger dumplings.

According to Luck, his love for cooking started out of necessity. Later inspired by French and Italian Chefs, Luck said he remembers feeling overwhelmed as a teen first learning how to cook up his passion.

“Everything was in French,” he stated. “I still have my notebooks from when I was 15, 16 years old and I go back and look at them and I would spell everything so wrong. I was just trying to keep up.”

Luck thrives on mentorship, and that’s exactly how he’s giving back to his hometown.

“To be able to teach some of our youth is actually one of my favorite things to do. Someone took that time and invested that time into me,” Luck stated. “They taught me how to cook at a very young age. So it’s one of my main drivers for why I do it.”

Chef Luck is a James Beard nominee, and a fan favorite on culinary competition shows like Top Chef, Chopped, and Beat Bobby Flay. He’s recently appeared on the Rachael Ray Show, the Today Show, and was featured in Food and Wine Magazine.

To stay ‘up-beet’ during the pandemic, Luck started virtual cooking classes to keep his restaurants alive and staff working. His casual Facebook lives would become a high demand around the community dinner table.

“The nice thing about doing virtual classes is it’s like watching me on TV. You get to sit back and enjoy, in the comfort of your own home,” Luck said.

Luck’s career has been followed by Varsity Tutors, the largest live learning platform in the country with more than 40,000 tutors teaching over 3,000 subjects. Its StarCourse series has approximately 300 classes from celebrity instructors teaching their passion all across the nation at no cost.

Varsity Tutor’s Chief Academic Officer, Brian Galvin, said it was hoping to add a cooking class to StarCourse for quite some time. Luck was the ‘pear-fect’ local connection.

“It was one of our better-reviewed classes of all time,” said Galvin. “We thought, ‘why weren’t we doing this before?'”

The first cooking class of StarCourse received an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5, according to Galvin. Families across the country from New York to California tuned in for Colorado Springs’ local celebrity chef.

“Brother Luck is so great at not just cooking but the culture and history around his cooking,” said Galvin. “He’s studied around the world and can trace the history of dumplings back to a thousand years.”

Luck is the owner of Lucky Dumpling, The Studio, and Four by Brother Luck in Downtown Colorado Springs.

For those who missed the class or need a refresher, Luck’s classes and tutorials can be accessed from his website. Stay tuned for his next independent virtual couples class where he’ll be teaching how to make cheese and chocolate fondue.