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Silence of the Lambs Cake & Big Stakes At the Chef Challenge!
Food & Wine’s kick-off last night was a blast: Tickets sold out. Scott Pampuch from the Corner Table had a bizarre and amazing cake frosted with a bright pink ganache made with beets. Michelle Gayer from the Salty Tart celebrated her inclusion on the Beard Awards’ long list with cookies shaped like mustaches, baked so that stick handles stuck down on one side. She was frosting them with your choice of frosting (Brown? White? Curled 19th century evil-doer style?) and taking Polaroid pictures of anyone who wanted their picture taken with their own mustache cookie—fun.
Of course, the big story of the night was everyone’s shock and grief about the loss of Heidi’s, Blackbird, and all the businesses that were lost to the fire that afternoon. We all swapped stories of kitchen fires big and small. I was cooking on a line once when the hood started on fire. There was only a small passage from the cooking line to the rest of the restaurant, and I bolted down that alley just as my chef bolted in with the fire extinguisher, spraying it upward. Other chefs shared stories of cooking rags catching fire, water spilling into deep-fryers, and similar calamities. There but by the grace of God go so many of us. Blessings to everyone impacted by the fire, and watch this space for news of coming benefits.
But of course, the show also goes on. Some of the fun gossip I heard last night vis-à-vis this weekend’s big Food & Wine Show: A pair of national TV scouts will be scouting the Local Chef Challenge for new talent. The Young-And-Hungry Battle (former champion Jon Radle versus La Belle Vie kitchen stalwart YC—known as Young Chef, and also Michael DeCamp), has had those two young chefs taunting each other by text message for months. Scott Pampuch dropped in on Jack Riebel and asked the bartender if the chef was in. The bartender said: "Yes, who shall I tell him is here?" And Pampuch said: “The Competition! He’ll know who!” And when Riebel emerged from the kitchen he found Pampuch studying his menus.
And finally, I hear that the cake competition is going to feature a Silence of the Lambs cake, replete with edible brains and a nice Chianti. Seriously. I’ll try to post updates on the battles in the comments from the show floor, or through my Twitter account, deardara. Saturday is sold out, but there are still some tickets available for Sunday (buy at the door), when the final rounds of the Local Chef Challenge will take place. So come on down if you can! Till then: Just try to picture a Silence of the Lambs cake. Will it star a fuzzy, Easter-style lamb? Anthony Hopkins? Both? That’s entertainment!
Posted on Friday, February 19, 2010 in Permalink
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Reader Comments:
Lots of fun today! Gateaux won the cake challenge -- such technical virtuosity. But I think more people will be talking about Celebration Generation's gorey and hilarious Silence of the Lambs cake, with a guy with his skull sawn off eating his own brain with fava beans and liver and a bottle of chianti.
From the Chef Challenge stage, the first battle featured a secret ingredient of dried cherries. For Cherry Battle, JD Fratzke from the Strip Club bested Rick Kimmes from the Oceanaire -- barely. He had some Meyer lemon elements in his shrimp dish that were a little out of balance, if not I don't know who would have won, these cooking competitions sometimes end up turning on the tiniest little things. Sameh Wadi (Saffron) faced John Occhiato (D'Amico Kitchen) with a secret ingredient of cauliflower. Pastry genius Adrienne Odom was in the audience and noted that cauliflower was an easy secret ingredient -- she was right. These were the most delicious dishes of the day by far. But Sameh used 4 different iterations of cauliflower in his scallop dish (cumin dusted and fried, cooked in a vinaigrette, with butter in a purée, roasted) and even though Occhiato's sea bass and cauliflower glazed with other root vegetables was super delicious maxing out the cauliflower took Sameh over the edge. Third battle was Scott Pampuch of Corner Table and Jack Riebel from the Dakota, and the secret ingredient: Canned smoked oysters. Chefs were not happy. But in the end Riebel's simpler mussel chowder with big nugget of oyster-compound-butter-paté and cracked pepper toasts worked better as a dish than Pampuch's more ambitious 2 appetizer combination of tempura pea tendrils with an oyster gremolata and cauliflower dried cherry soup (which one taster thought was the best dish of the day) and then rumaki (bacon around a whole smoked oyster) and a quickly pickled beet salad. Phew! Finally, the young and hungry battle:
See the next post because I'm out of room!
Okay, young and hungry battle: YC (Young Chef, aka Mike DeCamp) versus last year's champion Jon Radle of Grand Cafe. Their secret ingredient: Dates. Jon Radle would have seemed to have the upper hand because he had chosen as his protein lamb, but in the end YC's sturgeon won the day, it was delicate and perfectly cooked and somehow worked with its date polenta, bacon/date/red wine emulsion, and even more dates. I think Radle's problem was his decision to cook the lamb on the bone and then pull it off to serve, doing this left the meat unevenly done and parts were pretty tough and untrimmed. I didn't mind too much but some of the other judges thought it was a huge flaw. And that's all it takes to swing the competition one way or the other!
Really looking forward to tomorrow, all the winners will face one another (I don't know the matches yet) and the winner will head home with $5k!