La Victoria Healing Kitchen is designed as a place to bring community together for conversation and food. Owner Katie Goldman (center) runs three businesses out of the colorful building just off E. Colfax Ave.
During the pandemic in 2020, a lot of people picked up new hobbies, cleaned out the basement, or made sourdough bread. Katie Goldman bought a building.
The former American Legion Hall, just south of E. Colfax Ave. in the Aurora Cultural Arts District, now houses her three businesses, all under the La Victoria Healing Kitchen name.
Goldman credits her two grandmothers, Odessa and Virgina, for sending her a message to try something other than her career as an architect.
“They came to me during a meditation and told me to create a container and call it a healing kitchen,” she says. “I came out of that meditation saying, that’s what I have to do.”
Goldman told her husband about the healing kitchen idea, seeing it as a place where people could come together and collaborate around food. She didn’t even tour the interior when she decided to buy the building; she says she walked around outside and “felt the energy of the space and the area.”
Katie Goldman (far left) prepares lunch for the participants in a Rebel Bread sourdough class at La Victoria Healing Kitchen on a Saturday. The six-hour class teaches bread technique with a break for lunch and conversation.
The space needed more than that energy to bring it to its current form. The large windows had been covered over, and the building had been boarded up and neglected for years. It took a lot of work to build on what Goldman calls its “good bones.”
Now, just inside the front doors of the La Victoria Healing Kitchen, there’s a wide open room available for classes (like Rebel Bread’s Sourdough at Home), events, and parties. Large stovetops, colorful counters and cabinets welcome visitors.
Goldman says it’s humbling to see how things have come together with the classes and events and “some really great community collaborations.”
Aurora Mental Health and Recovery is one of those collaborations. In December, enrollees in an English-as-a-second-language class for adults spent time in the kitchen, putting their vocabulary skills to use, all centered around food.
“We’re in the original melting pot of the United States (Aurora), the modern-day version of that. I know not everybody would say that’s cool,” Goldman says. “I get that, but I think about all the different ideas and beauty and things that could come if we just sat around the table and ate some food together.”
Food and accessibility are the vision behind the food incubator at the back of the building, where small business owners can pay for time and space in one of four commercial kitchens—two of the kitchens are named after Goldman’s grandmothers. Currently there are about 30 businesses using the kitchens, with room for more. Goldman says it’s an accessible way to start a career.
“The food service industry is one of the few industries in our economy that has a low barrier to entry, so somebody could be washing dishes in a restaurant, and a couple of years later could be a James Beard-nominated chef,” she says. “The idea with the incubator is providing access to people to be able to have that pathway.”
A heart shaped cake and a Spring Fling, from Lala’s Bakery.
On the day Front Porch visited the incubator kitchens, Laura Madrid, owner of Lala’s Bakery, was busily baking Spring Fling cakes and covering them with gobs of cream cheese frosting. Madrid says her biggest challenge right now is egg prices, so she appreciates not worrying about where she’s going to bake. She says the incubator kitchens are helpful to business owners like herself, both for the kitchen space and the consulting from Goldman.
Lala’s Bakery owner, Laura Madrid, puts the finishing touches on a cake during a busy baking day in one of the four incubator kitchen rental spaces.
As a small business owner herself, Goldman is working through her own challenges in raising awareness about the business, which is part of the Colfax fabric but not directly on Colfax, and in getting people out of their comfort zones to come to the area.
“Everybody is going to always be comfortable in their bubble. I get that. I have my own bubble, too. But part of the beauty in challenging yourself and learning and growing and being a part of a thriving community is being neighborly and getting out of your bubble,” says Goldman, who lives in Park Hill.
The thriving community along Colfax is what brought her and other businesses to the arts district area.
“I think the people that I have met, the organizations that have already been here, and the things that are going on here create something that is really special and has an opportunity to be a guiding light and a really strong point,” Goldman says. “And all of the neighborhoods surrounding this area have the ability to be a part of that story, too.”
Goldman acknowledges the financial challenges of running a small business and the uncertainty of what might happen with the economy and U.S. Small Business Administration loans under the Trump Administration. Cooking classes are not necessity-based offerings, she concedes, but she remains hopeful about the future of the business, which includes the kitchens, the incubator, and her consulting business.
“I named it La Victoria because it means victory, and it’s a feminine word in Spanish, which I think is amazing,” Goldman says. “My grandmother spoke about Victory Gardens [during World War II] and the amount of community and support that came with that, and I thought, ‘That’s it!’”
La Victoria Healing Kitchen: 1427 Elmira St., Aurora. www.lavictoriahk.com.
Lala’s Bakery: www.springflingatlalasbakery.com.
Front Porch photos by Christie Gosch
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