chadzilla: dinner highlights

The dinner on Tuesday night, although it was for our corporate food & beverage director, was also a great chance to showcase some of our food ideas for most of the departmental managers and our peers in the hotel. We all work together everyday and interact through good and bad situations, but this allowed us to really explain what we do without words. At a corporate meeting recently, one of our corporates had a tendency to repeatedly mention passion and ask the question, 'what is your passion?' To us, the answer to that should be obvious to everyone. Our intention was not to answer this question with words, but with taste, sight, smell, and touch. Chef K also was requested to sit down for the dinner, which allowed us even further to show our team strengths... but also allowed for him to speak about each course, the ideas behind them, and any other antecdotes that might be appropriate.

So, here is a recap of that night. Keep in mind that the photos were taken in the heat of action. Food shots are as is. We had to plate up in an emptly function room on the 4th floor away from our kitchen which obviously created it's own challenges... the biggest being food temperatures. Most of the plating was done by myself and our assistant sous chef, Marianne. Of course, desserts were plated by Fabian.

Below are the peas & carrot cake hors d'oeuvres from the previous post. We topped them with an old-school tribute star-tipped whipped mascarpone and dusted the plate with mint butter powder.

We opened the meal with a rip-off of Josh Dechellis' idea from the ICC. Just by coincidence, we even used the same fish, kampachi, because we had it on hand. We press/cured the sashimi slices of kampachi between thinly laid out slices of serrano ham for 24 hours. It seemed a shame to serve the fish without the serrano so we cut them into small ravioli-style squares. They are topped with thin shaved melon confit and we added honeydew drops to the plate.

Skipping around a little, here is a dish we called 'Peruvian sushi.' The sliced roll in the back is causa potato dough wrapped in nori with tobiko. We poached shrimp in evoo with citrus. The 2 sauces are an aji amarillo cream and soja sauce. The shrimp is topped with a small sprig of cilantro tempura. We do not see any use of Peruvian ideas in menus anywhere, and we feel that this cuisine is ripe to be explored. Peruvian cuisine has the simplicity, control, and balance of Japanese food with the vivaciousness of Latin-American food. If anyone is looking for a new ethnic cuisine to explore, try Pervuian. A great book to add to your library is "The Art of Peruvian Cuisine" by Tony Custer. Proceeds from the book go to helping the children of Peru.

The next course was a cobb salad. This was an inside joke due to the fact that we've had much grief from various corporate family members who all believe that a cobb salad should be made in various specific ways. We quietly retaliated with this version of our own. The actual 'salad' is baby mache with jellied tomato seeds. The plate is dressed with an avocado ranch. We incorporated a 2 hour egg (62C) for the boiled egg component and a bacon blue cheese marble. Fresh cracked black pepper and sunflower seed salt are put on the plate for the egg. It ended up being the all around favorite of the evening.

Fabian's dessert was a chocolate olive oil cake topped with coconut foam and goat cheese ice cream. The black dots are a black sesame seed sauce along with a chocolate brush and rosemary syrup.

Without taking up too much more space, I have left out a couple of courses. Some of my pictures were too bad to post. Among the missing courses were a Greek rouen duck plate and an entree of dry-aged cote de boeuf. Both of these meats were from 4 story hill farm in Pennsylvania. Maybe more about these later.