2006 Food & Wine Magazine Entertaining Showcase, Nov 15

Chicago's own internationally acclaimed chefs, including Alinea's Grant Achatz and Moto's Homaro Cantu, will personally serve signature tastings tomorrow night at the 8th annual Food & Wine Entertaining Showcase at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

I'll be there. If you're going, please PM me - I'd love to meet up.

Tickets may still be available at the door.
http://www.foodandwine.com/ext/chicago/

Louisa,
This may be an "oh no!" for me, do you think Chef Achatz will be returning to Alinea post-event? I have my reservation there (with Crazy C) at 9:15.
It's almost ironic that Chef Bowles, Achatz and Cantu are all going to be at one venue... especially since I've been trying to dine out at their establishments over the last few days!

So Louisa, I saw your post after the fact - I was there last night. What did you think? One of my very favorites was that artichoke soup from NoMI. I also loved the quail egg ravioli from Schwa and I really liked the flavor of those little bites that onesixtyblue was serving up. What did you think was really good and just average?

Renka - as you already know, Chef Achatz returned to Alinea in time for your dinner. Phew!

Three of his chefs served 800 strips of his "Bacon, butterscotch, apple, thyme" - an extra crispy slice of Nueske's bacon, spiraled with a drizzle of butterscotch, garnished with razor-thin ribbons of dried apple puree, and tiny thyme leaves.

rosie - The artichoke soup with lardons, hazelnuts, and bacon foam from Christophe David/NoMI was delicious. Missed out completely on one sixtyblue. And could only watch as Michael Carlson/Schwa's signature quail egg ravioli with buffalo ricotta, Parmigiano-Reggiano, brown butter, sage, and freshly shaved white truffle were gobbled up.

It was an overwhelmingly amazing event - amongst my favourites were, in no particular order:
- Grant Achatz/Alinea's Bacon
- Homaro Cantu/Ben Roche/moto's Thanksgiving day dinner cocktail shot (inspired by the Food & Wine November 2006 cover)
- Paul Virant/Vie's duck breast, red curry squash butter, cracklins, candied pumpkin seeds, sherry vinegar caramel
- Shawn McClain/Custom House's rabbit and pork terrine studded with pistachios and figs on celery root puree and pickled butternut squash with frisee
- Paul Kahan/Blackbird's cured salmon with persimmon and yogurt
- Graham Elliot Bowles/Avenues' smoked Vichyssoise with chive marshmallow
- Della Gossett/Charlie Trotter's red pepper and Hungarian cherry chile jellies

And all-you-could-eat jamon serranno was just porky icing on the cake.

For those of you who have been to this before, what is it like? Do all the chefs present one at a time? Do you just walk from table to table trying out the items? Does anyone speak at it? I noticed it's 3 hours long. Planning on buying my tickets soon, just want to be a bit more informed first.

Thanks!

jennydran wrote:For those of you who have been to this before, what is it like? Do all the chefs present one at a time? Do you just walk from table to table trying out the items? Does anyone speak at it? I noticed it's 3 hours long. Planning on buying my tickets soon, just want to be a bit more informed first.

Thanks!

Yes, everybody has tables set up and serve simultaneously. Depending on the hour and section, walking between tables is optimistic - it's more shuffling - it can get very crowded, but without fail good-natured and polite. No one speaks per se, but there are usually a couple of workshops - how to entertain, wine, etc. Overall it's an incredibly enjoyable time. I'm hoping that Michael Carlson will still be there again this year despite the fact that Schwa is gone.

The date on this post is incorrect -- the correct date is Monday, November 12. Here's a link to my previous post about this event.

Based on the thread title and the first several posts, I'm gonna go ahead and guess that this thread was about last year's event.

JimTheBeerGuy wrote:Based on the thread title and the first several posts, I'm gonna go ahead and guess that this thread was about last year's event.

Yeah, maybe we should move discussion about this year's event to the thread linked above by BR. In fact, I already posted a question there

=R=

JimTheBeerGuy wrote:Based on the thread title and the first several posts, I'm gonna go ahead and guess that this thread was about last year's event.

Oops -- I jumped the gun and didn't read it too carefully.