Why does Captain Pike have a kitchen on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Anson Mount reveals why Captain Pike gets a kitchen on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Star Trek’s captains are known for their unique personalities and quirks. Jonathan Archer wanted to watch water polo games so the Federation sent him matches as soon as they could. Kathryne Janeway was an advent lover of art and literature, spending hours in the holodecks reliving her favorite books. Jean-Luc Picard loved Shakespeare and music, often playing various instruments throughout his time on the Enterprise. And Benjamin Siskok was an Advent fan of baseball, a sport hundreds of years dead by the time Deep Space Nine came around.

So many captains are defined by their quirks or hobbies, and none more so than Anson Mount’s Christoper Pike on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Like the captains before him, he too has a love of things; namely horses and cooking. And since bringing a horse onto a starship wasn’t practical, he settled for cooking.

And apparently, the reason this all happened came relatively out of nowhere.

Anson Mount explains Christopher Pike’s kitchen in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Speaking to a crowd at a Q&A to benefit the SAG-AFTRA Foundation (via ScreenRant), Mount revealed how his character’s kitchen came to be. Speaking to the crowd, Mount revealed that he and Akiva Goldsman had a talk about how they saw the character of Pike, saying

"One of the things Akiva and Henry, our showrunners, are so good at is that… occasionally, they’ll have meetings where they bring each one of us into the writers’ room to talk character. And the first time that we did this while in the planning for season 1… It’s a lot of them asking us questions, actually.I said there’s very few things about Pike that I know. And one of them is that when any crew members comes to him with a concern, everything else goes away. It’s all about this person in front of him because that’s his greatest asset. He’s smart enough to know that his crew is really the engine that runs the Enterprise. And for some reason, that sparked an idea in Avika who said. “I’m getting a picture of maybe Captain’s Table dinners.”And I said, “Oh wait a minute.” Because he’s a horse guy, and he can’t take his horse on the Enterprise. What if each Captain gets one ask for their quarters. One special ask. And what if Pike’s other thing is cooking, and so he asked for a kitchen. And Akiva said, “That’s it. I’m calling [production designer] Jonathan Lee right now. We’re getting you a kitchen.”… And It’s been great. It’s turned out to be a very useful space."

The “one ask” will likely be part of Trek canon going forward, and we’re very happy to see how this manifests in future shows.