Alia Z.
Yelp
I only have experience with the home cook classes, which are great fun. My husband and I have taken 3 so far between the two of us - knife skills, sauces, and dim sum.
The sauce class was amazing - over the course of two days, we learned 24 different sauces, and covered every type of sauce (dessert ones too!). We made a dish with each sauce, so we got some experience of what to pair them with. They gave us recipe packets and we went over the recipes and ingredient selection (take notes, there's a lot of information that gets shared that's not on the recipe), and then each person got to focus on one or two dishes, with interruptions to check out the important aspects of what other people were working on.
The knife skills class was more basic - while fun, we already knew a lot of the information in it. There were still a few tricks to learn, of course, but it seems that past learning the basics, knife skills is mostly about getting lots of practice.
The dim sum class was similar to the sauce class in the format - a bunch of recipes and each person got to pick which one they want to work on. For me, the main reason to take that class was to get some familiarity with ingredients that I haven't been exposed to (OK, I've eaten them, but I haven't cooked with them!). The techniques were introduced clearly and each of us got to practice putting together the different kinds of dumplings and potstickers and such. Since then, I've made the Cha Siu Bao, and it looks like what we learned in class stuck.
I like using the cooking classes to increase my comfort level with ingredients that I haven't grown up using. Yes, I could print out a recipe and figure out a lot of it, but how and what to buy is a bit harder when I'm working with unfamiliar cuisine. The little tricks that I inevitably end up picking up from the classes are incredibly handy and increase my comfort level with cooking even more.