You may have heard of the Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival
but you might not have attended. The Festival celebrated food and wine in
venues in and around Los Angeles for four days, August 25-28.
In its sixth year, the Festival expanded to the West Side
with events at the Fairmont Hotel in Santa Monica and the Barker Hanger at the Santa
Monica Airport.
If you have attended Barney’s twice-annual sale at the
Barker, you know the cavernous space. A football field sized interior without
character was transformed for the Festival. Off-white fabric was draped along
the walls, giving the warehouse the feeling of a very large, very elegant tent.
Because the venue was sponsored by Lexus, there were half a
dozen beautifully polished cars outside and inside the hanger.
People were dressed like people always dress in LA. Casual, very casual and red carpet premiere chic.
Local chefs from the Los Angeles area were joined by chefs
from as far away as Miami to celebrate the Festival. Walking from table to table, you could
experience a variety of regional cuisines, American, Vietnamese, Peruvian, Italian,
Thai, Mexican, to name a few. You could enjoy appetizers, entrées and
desserts. And you could sample spirits, beers and a great many wines.
Wines were poured from California, Spain and France.
How to Festival
After showing your ticket, you entered Barker. A friendly server approached you with a glass of wine. What an excellent way to begin!
If this was your first festival, hopefully someone told you to
pace yourself. Eat every small plate you are offered and you wouldn’t make it
half way around Barker.
The best way to experience a food festival is walk around
before you eat anything.
At each table, a menu placard indicates the name of the
chef, the restaurant, the dish being served and the ingredients. Write down
which ones look good to you. When you have finished your survey of all the
vendors, go back to the ones that looked good.
If you are like me, there were a lot of dishes you wanted to
try. The next choice is, eat all of the small plate or take just a bite and
move on until you have sampled all of the dishes that looked good to you.
At that point, you can return to those chefs whose dishes
you really LOVED and eat an entire plate of their food.
Even though the plates are small, eat half a dozen and you
will become very full.
You will discover that not all chefs are created equal. Some
dishes are wonderful. Some not so much.
The best chefs understand that the festival is like a
cocktail or wine party. Everyone eats standing up, holding a plate in one hand
and a fork in the other.
One chef served a duck sausage bahn mi, an open faced
version of the popular Vietnamese sandwich. The portion was generous but the
design was not. The sausage was cut in half length-wise but the casing was left
on. Eating the sausage without a knife and fork was difficult because your teeth
could not cut through the casing.
The chefs
Homegating Slider Zone sponsored by the NFL Shop. After
declaring your favorite NFL team (Go Patriots!), you
constructed a beef slider. I customized
mine with Cole slaw, sautéed onions, butter pickles with sriracha aioli.
To the right of Homegating was Eagle Rock Brewery Public
House Restaurant which served a shrimp fry bread with pickled corn and okra
small bite round. Great crunch and heat. A nice way to begin the festival.
Not just Los Angeles chefs made appearances. Chef Billy Ngo
from Sacramento’s Kru served a crispy ball of white snow crab shushi-kani miso
avocado mousse nori & arané (crumbled toasted rice crackers). Very tasty.
Robert Irvine from the Food Network cheerfully posed with
fans who wanted to preserve the moment. It is a rare opportunity when the dining
public can meet chefs who rarely stray from their kitchens. Even rarer when a chef
performs their craft on television, so this was an exceptionally special moment
for fans to meet a chef they love on TV.
For those who wanted to taste Irvine’s cooking,
he served up a small plate of half a deviled egg and southern fried chicken
seasoned with buttermilk and sriracha. The chicken was crisp and nicely
seasoned with a good amount of heat.
Established restaurants used the Festival to feature their
culinary point of view. Some chefs used the Festival like a soft opening. Chef
Bruce Kalman and Marie Petulla the partners behind Union in Pasadena and Bread
downtown, plated an excellent octopus and garbanzo bean salad seasoned with a
preserved lemon yogurt dressing a crunchy Egyptian dukkah (Sesame seeds,
Coriander, pistachio and cumin).
The dish was exceptionally good. The tasting
was not only to illustrate the quality of the menu at Union and Bread, but also
to announce their new restaurant in Culver City, slated to open in mid-2017.
Chef Tomas Mendez’s Peruvian restaurant Picca was represented by his ceviche criollo with seabass, rocoto, leche de tigre, choclo, canchas
and a small cube of sweet potato.
Illustrating the culinary influence on Peru
from Spain, Japan, Italy and China, the dish was complex but thoroughly
integrated. A lovely combination of sweet heat and fresh seafood. A key
ingredient is Peruvan corn. Purchased dried, it is deep fried very quickly in
hot oil. As Mendez joked, Peruvian pop corn.
One of the most fun parts of the Festival is the accessibility
of chefs. When I took a bite of Mendez’s ceviche, I was filled with questions.
Happily, chef Mendez was standing at the front of the booth, readily available
to talk. What fun!
For me, Mendez’s ceviche was the best dish in the Festival.
After walking around the hanger, one thing became very
clear. Ceviche was popular.
One of the best, besides Picca’s, was from chef Brian Huskey
of Orange County’s Tackle Box. His shrimp ceiche with jicama and cucumber was
fresh tasting with good heat. He nicely sauced the ceviche so after the shrimp
and vegetables were enjoyed, the Michelada flavored juice was the last part to
be consumed along with the topping of crunchy tortilla chip strips
with cilantro sprouts, cherry tomatoes, red onions.
Another very good ceviche was served at the Stella Artois
booth. Chef Marcel Vigneron from Wolf served two ceviches. One he called
“Laughing Bird Ceviche” with melon, tomato, puffed quinoa and leche de tigre.
The other he made with Hamachi, seasoned with Vietnamese nuos cham, watermelon
radish and puffed rice.
Not just wine
I confess I was not able to taste the wines that were being
served. If I had sampled the ones that looked interesting, I would have gotten
too inebriated to have completed my circuit around Barker.
I limited myself to samples at the Hendrick’s gin, Owl Brew
and Soyelent booths.
Hendrick’s went all out with two mixologists pouring two
different cockatils in a bar set up backed by a vintage car decorated in wildly
fun graphics. The two cocktails were good.
One was a riff on a familiar
cocktail called the Unusual Negroni (1 part Hendrick’s Gin, 1 part Lillet
Blanch, 1 part Aperol). The other was an entertaining refreshment called the
Tropic of Capricorn (1 part Hendrick’s Gin, 1 part Kiwi Green Tea, ½ part fresh
lemon juice, 12 part simple syrup, ¼ part pear juice, Peychaud’s Bitters to taste,
1 part soda water).
So if you missed this year’s festival, you really must put
into your calendar that you will attend the Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival in
2017.
We drove for five minutes through stands of trees draped with Spanish moss interspersed with views of the valley below where the green fields were covered with brightly flowered mustard plants. As we rounded a turn, we were stopped by a wrought-iron gate. We punched in the security code, the gate swung open. For the first time we could see Villa Andrea on the crest of the hill.
