Alex Fregerio and his wife Christine are bringing a culinary entertainment studio to downtown Missoula, a place where kids can get their hands doughy for cupcake wars or adults can sip cocktails and make sushi. Best of all, someone else cleans up the mess.

Taste Buds Kitchen will be a kid’s kitchen by day and an adult BYOB kitchen by night.

The Fregerios have been busy remodeling the space at 131 E. Main St., and they hope to be offering cooking classes and kid’s camps by the third week in July.

“It’s a culinary entertainment business,” Fregerio explained. “We’ll have cooking classes mostly for kids, and we’ll also have some adult classes as well. It’s a new franchise out of New York, and we’ll be their fourth location.”

For adults, there will be classes on sushi and dumplings, Spanish tapas, New York-syle pizza, steaks, Italian food, handmade pasta, brunch and adult cupcake wars.

Kids can participate in Baking 101, Master Chef junior camps, cookie and cupcake wars, chocolate lovers camps and mystery basket sessions. There will be workshops on parfaits, empanadas, rainbow cupcakes, ice cream cones, macaroni and sprinkle doughnuts. Customers can book birthday party extravaganzas, private lessons, at-home parties, decorating stations and play dates.

The Fregerios, both Kalispell natives, noticed the popularity of cooking classes at places like the Good Food Store in Missoula, where there is often a waiting list, and traveled to New York to take classes at the original Taste Buds Kitchen. Neither one is a professional chef, but Alex has a teaching license. However, like many aspiring educators, he found it impossible to find a job in Missoula and didn’t want to move his family to eastern Montana.

“We are just amateur enthusiasts,” he explained. “We’ve both been foodies for a long time, we both enjoy cooking. We have a 2-year-old daughter, and as she’s gotten bigger we realized there’s not a whole lot of children’s activities available in Missoula. She enjoys baking and cooking, and we thought other people would be into it as well. My wife saw Taste Buds, and we went out to New York and saw how they run things. I think people in Missoula will really respond well to it.”

The point of the studio is not to create professional chefs. Rather, it’s meant to be a fun, interactive lesson that people can utilize at home.

Alex will teach most of the classes, but they may bring in guest chefs as well. Kids of every age, as young as 2, will be able to participate in Iron Chef-type competitions where one specific ingredient is used to make a variety of dishes and then the results are judged.

“The first day we might have them bring in carrots and we’ll actually make like three dishes a day,” Alex said, describing one of the half-day cooking camps. “They’ll use the carrots to make a muffin-type bread that’s a little more savory and make a puree for something else and then use it to make like a sweet cupcake. In that camp, the kids can do a lot of different stuff and we’ll pull in a parent act as judges and we’ll have an awards ceremony.”

Everything will be made from scratch, and the Fregarios expect to run through huge quantities of raw ingredients for things like pasta and homemade pasta sauce.

There will be 12 different two-hour adult classes and 60 kid’s classes ranging from one hour to three-hour summer camp sessions.

For the adult classes, the Fregerios envision date nights where couples can bring in a bottle of wine and learn to make pasta or group parties where people learn to make gourmet eggs Benedict and French toast while drinking mimosas.

It won’t be a commercial kitchen, and they won’t be serving food to the public, but the Fregerios have ordered brand-new blenders, mixers, ovens and refrigerators.

“We’ll have a real nice kitchen, and everything is baked in a convection oven,” Fregerio explained. “The 2-year-old classes are a little big hands-on. There is one class called Parent and Me or Mommy and Me, and we make cupcakes and we’ll be mixing up dough and decorating them. We have a bunch of different themes.”

There will be some adult classes taught by professional chefs for people interested in knife skills and French cuisine, as well as some technical skills.

“We’re not here to make people into chefs, it’s more just for fun,” Fregerio said. “But of course, you’re going to learn a lot too. Making pasta, for instance, a lot of people think it sounds really intimidating. It’s actually pretty easy, but it’s kind of one of those things where it’s a lot easier if someone takes you through it with a group, rather than try to sit down at your kitchen table and look online. That’s the nice thing about it too. We’re constantly clearing the dishes and everything’s prepped for you and measured out. All the tedious parts of cooking are taken out and just the fun parts are left, mixing it and cooking it and eating it.”

For more information visit tastebudskitchen.com/missoula.

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