Prix Fixe

Foodportunity, tonight at the Heathman.

Thought I'd drop a quick note, that tonights the night for Foodportunity Oregon at the Heathman Hotel downtown. A lot of great restaurants are going to be in attendance and serving up some of their best dishes. There's networking opportunities, and just a whole lot of fun.

You can get tickets through Brown Paper Tickets and most likely at that door.

If you can't tell, I'm pretty jazzed about tonight. I'll be handling on the video and picture taking for the restaurant, whilst we serve up our famous radish dish and a chicken liver pate that is just off the charts. What's great (for me anyways) is that I can network all round. Not only with the cooks and chefs but with the food writing community in PDX. I'd really like to see a good turnout so we can do this again next year.

Most likely I'll be live tweeting the event, from both accounts (@PrixFixeOnline & @ScratchFoods). Not to mention I'll be taking a ton of pictures and video of the festivities.

Hopefully I'll have a full re-cap tomorrow, or at the latest Wednesday.

On The Fly: Inside noma - A Docsconz Video

Another great video from Doc.

If you haven't checked out "Docsconz" I highly suggest that you change that - and go a'readin'. Link to his blog is at the end of this post, and over on the side bar.

In the second half of August I had the opportunity to travel to Copenhagen and visit noma, the restaurant now considered by The San Pellegrino World's Fifty Best Restaurants as the number one restaurant in the world. Prior to dining there, I had the opportunity to visit the restaurant before lunch service and had a tour from Chef Rene Redzepi himself.

We were joined by my friend and dinner partner, Chef Scott Boswell of the restaurants Stella! and Stanley in New Orleans, Louisiana. I hope this short video provides a glimpse into the inside of a truly incredible restaurant.

Inside noma from John Sconzo on Vimeo.

via docsconz.typepad.com

FF: The oncoming storm...

I took this when we were on our way back from my son's 8th grade graduation in June. We were driving along the Columbia Gorge and the cloud formations were too cool looking - not to stop and take some pictures.

A burrito by any other name...

This was another course from the tasting menu we did for my family (Mom,Dad & Kiddo). Chef called a "French" burrito for the lack of a better term. It's black cod wrapped in a chive crepe. The sauce is a sweet corn beurre blanc, on the other side of the plate is a basil coulis with a Oregon cherry tomato.

NFTL: Foodportunity PDX

You've probably seen me tweet about this a lot, well more like re-tweets but you get the idea. This is going to be a great event, and the first time that it's been held in the Portland market. 

Do you want to rub elbows with the PDX food community? Are you a blogger, food writer or critic? This is the event for you. If you can't tell I'm pretty excited, as Scratch was invited to be one of the 10 or so restaurants to showcase their food and what we're about.

Some of the other restaurants include, Ten01 (hoping to see @slow_lane at the event), Beaker & Flask, and the list goes on. Not only that but there will be some great speakers on hand, who amazingly enough are Chefs. Including Naomi Pomeroy of Beast, Gabe Rucker of Le Pigeon and more. I haven't had a chance to meet either of those two chefs, and looking forward to introducing myself.

Here's some of the low down on the event:

The culinary networking event takes place at the Heathman Restaurant and Bar on Monday,September 13,2010 from 6 to 9 p.m. Tickets are $22 (including all handling fees) per person and include appetizers and a wide range of food products from local companies.

Tickets are on sale now through Brown Paper Tickets.

Here's the list of speakers for Monday Night.

They are looking for volunteer's as well, just follow @foodportunityOR and DM them with your info. This is going to be a big event, and hopefully a annual occurrence.

So either grab your tix, or sign up to lend a helping hand. Hope to see you there! 

Now that's a chop!

This was a recent special we did. A double cut pork chop, a high end mac and cheese w/ sauted green beans. This special lasted all of about an hour before it was gone. And in the background, that's our shrimp risotto.

On The Fly: Shameless Plug

Hope everyone is getting to enjoy their labor day weekend, since things are a bit slow I figured I'd do a bit of cross promoting here.

Head on over to Geek. Cred. to check me out waxing poetic about another time, and sometimes universe. "Roll For initiative".  I take a look at a  younger gaming me, so if your interested in finding out a bit about me - from a non-food perspective, please head over and check it out.

FF: Q'ing at the Fair

This is one of the first years I've attended the Oregon State Fair on opening weekend, and the BBQ'ers were in full force. While I didn't have any of his offerings, I did have some Q. I wasn't overly impressed with what I had, good but not great.

Enjoy your Labor Day weekend!

NFTL: More from the vault..

[The restaurant is on a mini staycation, and we'll be returning to the kitchen on Friday. I've been wrapped up in the launch of Geek. Cred. and working on other projects. Things will be getting back to what I deem as 'normal' soon. So I bring you another installment of "From The Vault"]

*****

NFTL: Of wolf packs and alley menus

On Sunday night chef and the rest of the team put on a charity dinner for The Women of Vision, which is a great organization by the way, and the things they're doing for women right here in our back yard as well as internationally are nothing short of amazing. 

To you up to speed, a while back Chef was put up for charity auction for the aforementioned Women of Vision, Sunday night was the night we were putting on the auction winners and their guests.

In the week leading up to the dinner, chef had a pretty good handle on what we were going to do. He wanted to use on ingredient as a 'theme' ingredient - a little bit of Iron Chef America warm up (we're less than a month away from heading to New York, still can't believe we're going). 

So at first it was "Battle Shrimp" until, we found out that one of the diners that evening had a shell fish allergy, and the menu was scrapped.

Then he came up with "Battle Beef", and had a menu pretty much sketched out in his head. Then came the day of the event, he'd picked up some choice wagyu beef - the menu in his head? 86'd. We adjourned to the alley behind the restaurant to toss some things around.

Five minutes, BLAMMO! Seven course menu, including desert and every damn dish had beef in it. I should mention right now it just wasn't me and chef. We've taken on our next extern, the former is now in France working the Cannes Film Festival, and then to stay in Europe for a while. Oh, and yeah Daniel was there too....

This marks our third extern, so for color me impressed - he fits in well and the passion he has is frakkin' great. So a new member to the wolfpack and from what I understand he'll be with us for 3 months. 

Anyways, back to our story.

OTF Update: Sinju [still] not talkin', Guido is..

On Saturday I posted about sushi restaurant Sinju and Guido Rahr who was banned from the restaurant after; objecting to the endangered Blue Fin that was on Sinju's menu. Go ahead and click that link, I'll wait for you to catch up - if you aren't already.

This comes from the Atlantic, and was posted yesterday.Though it seems Sinju and it's owners aren't talking. First rule of Blue Fin and all that.

Guido Rahr of the Wild Salmon Center, is more than willing to talk.

When my first post on this went live Saturday, I got a tweet that to sum it up - this guy was a tool and supported what Sinju did. Why I don't fully agree with that, and on some level there could have been a billion other ways to avoid the bad press and make everyone happy. They chose not to do this (as of this writing), so Mr. Rahr is going to keep talking.

Keep in mind, we're only getting one side of said story here. But let's get started shall we? It started out innocent enough, when he inquired about the breed - Atlantic or Pacific? When he was told that it was of course, Atlantic Blue Fin he had to respond.

In what he insists was a diplomatic manner, Rahr said that he recommended that the restaurant consider not serving Atlantic bluefin. "I said it really politely and more in the sense of, 'I'm a regular customer and I'm concerned. You really ought to think twice about doing this—especially in Portland where we take sustainability seriously,'" he told me in a telephone interview.

Emphasis is all mine, baby..all mine!

Erm, where were we?

That's right, diplomatic and all that.

Then according him, returned the next day and dropped off packet of information on the Blue Fin and how it's being fished to extinction. He returned a month or so later, and was told that he wasn't welcome - and that:

"She[the hostess]said the staff were afraid to serve me,"

According to the rest of the article, Mr. Chen who heads up the whole thing - hasn't replied to the email Rahr sent. The Atlantic tried to contact him via phone and was successful (sorta),he told the Atlantic to email him thier questions, and (Spoiler Alert!) he has yet to return that email as well. This is a bit surprising to me. I mean, wouldn't you want to now, nip this in the bud before it got any further?

Maybe Mr. Chen thinks that if he ignores his inbox enough - this will all go away and he can keep serving a dieing species.

Because hey! Endangered never tasted so good!

Of course, we've still only got one side of this story - and until Mr. Chen reverses his rectal/cranial inversion we'll only have one side of this he said/she said. I learned long ago, that you can't ignore something long enough for it to just 'go away'. And of course; I'm sure we haven't heard the last from Mr. Rahr yet either.