By invite only, foodies and Buick enthusiasts attended an exclusive culinary event hosted by Buick and Food & Wine magazine on January 21 and 22 at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills. Guests enjoyed a scheduled program glittered with test driving Buick’s latest vehicles, wine tasting with sommelier Michael Green, and exciting demos and tastings from some of the nations’ most prominent and innovative chefs, headlining with Master Chef Michael Psilakis.
Culinary demos
In the theme of discovery, guests attended a wine tasting taught by sommelier Michael Green and three culinary demos from Master and Celebrity Chef Michael Psilakis, Food and Wine magazine’s best new chef, Josiah Citrin of Melisse in Santa Monica, and one of the country’s most innovative pastry chefs, Ben Roche of Moto in Chicago. Demonstrations of different styles of cooking while educating guests and their palates were central to the event. Pastry Chef Ben Roche tells us, “not only do I get to reach out to thousands of people every weekend, but you’re actually in front of the people getting to talk to them, meet them, and they get to try the food.”
Sommelier Michael Green taught an abridged course on wine tasting, where guests sampled a 2009 M. Chapoutier Cotes-du-Rhones Belleruche Rouge accentuated with aged Manchego cheese and a 2010 Rodney Strong Charlotte’s Home Sauvignon Blanc accentuated with a lemon wedge. Teaching the most important lesson of all, “if you like it, it is a good wine.”
Beyond the palate
Covering multiple aspects of the culinary arts, guest are able to discover the culinary mastery of each chef, as Chef Michael Psilakis tells us, “Ben is the pastry chef, who is molecularly driven, who is cutting edge, introduces you to a style of food you may not have known before and goes beyond the palette. Chef Josiah, french classic training with the scallop and how he’s fusing all these different culinary worlds where he has Asian, French, and Mediterranean falling into one hybrid dish, and then you have me teaching lets cook food together lets create these memories.”
Chef Josiah Citrin presented a Hokkaido scallop on top of a quenelle of cauliflower puree and served with lime gelee, basil and prawn salt.
Pastry chef Roche presented a S’mores Bomb, a chocolate bomb filled with a graham cracker puree/milk, and appropriately lit on its marshmallow wick. As Chef Roche tells us, it is “a contrast of a thinner liquid to the crispy chocolate, its such a surprise, its a burst of liquid. Whenever you can take somebody by surprise with a texture or flavor, it has such a big impact because they remember it – it’s the one where I ate it and it blew up in my mouth.”
For Chef Michael Psilakis, food is a vehicle for some of the most important memories of his life and the dish that he presented was a tender fried pork and beef meatball served with a chucky tomato sauce and topped with herbs and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. And to conclude the event was Chef Michael Psilakis who told endearing and personal anecdotes of his childhood, his life, and what food means to him, chef told us, “all I do is think about food.”