Fancy Pants Foodie

Foodie news, reviews and how-tos from Arkansas and beyond.

Culinary Inspiration at Wildwood Wine and Food Festival

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Points for the most creative (and possibly the most delicious and complex) dish goes to Oceans for their tuna tataki. It was served on a watermelon base with fresh cucumber, sriracha, spicy mayo, and caviar. A bit hard to eat, but the combination of spicy, sweet, salty and savory was a bite to behold.

On Friday night, I got to experience the Wildwood Wine and Food Festival in a completely new way — as a diner.

In the past, if I was at this event, it was as a culinary student, serving up items we had made in class. This year, I got to casually walk from station to station, chatting with the chefs and visiting with friends I saw there. It was kinda fabulous, other than trying to figure out what in the world to wear since I couldn’t wear a chef coat!

Having this extra time to savor each dish (or at least study the gluten-having ones I couldn’t eat) also allowed me to learn more about each chef’s philosophy and ways to use different ingredients. I’m sharing some of these items with you in the slideshow below so we can be inspired together.

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Giveaway: Two Tickets to this Friday’s Wildwood Wine and Food Festival

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Manager Greg Robinson and Executive Chef James Hale from Acadia at the Wildwood Wine and Food Festival in 2010. Acadia will be among the participating restaurants again this year.

Note: The contest is over! Congrats to Sam L. See you at the event on Friday!

This Friday is one of my favorite foodie events of the year, the Wildwood Wine and Food Festival held at the Wildwood Park for the Arts in Little Rock.

I first experienced the event two years ago as a culinary student, as Pulaski Technical College Arkansas Culinary School had a table to present tasty wares created by students. This was one of the first times I was able to directly have a hand in creating good food, then handing it directly to the people who were going to (hopefully) enjoy it. It was extremely gratifying and was probably a defining moment in my passion to make people happy through food.

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Wildwood Wine and Food Festival

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The crowd begs for more (ha) at the Pulaski Tech table.

I worked among an army of white-clad culinary students at Friday’s Wildwood Wine and Food Festival, both to learn from the other chefs there and to bring our own offerings to the party.

Our team from Pulaski Technical College Arkansas Culinary School served crab cakes with fruit coulis, stuffed profiteroles (think cream puff), beef wontons with a spicy mango salsa, and the sleeper hit of the party: roasted, overstuffed baby red potato halves.

I really loved working the table, answering questions about the school and about our food, or cooking in general. It’s one of those moments my PR background comes in handy, I guess.

If you saw my tweet about the focaccia…well…it didn’t make it there. Apparently I overmixed a bit, and they were a little tough. I guess we’re at school to learn, right? I think they’re going to serve some of the better pieces at the school café. Consider yourself forewarned.

Some of the highlights from the event:

  • Lewis Curtis, executive chef at Lulav, cooked two dishes while a flurry of attention buzzed around him. This Wednesday marks the premiere of this season’s Hell’s Kitchen, where he is among the cooks up against Chef Gordon Ramsay’s simmering temper. My quick observation of Curtis: talented and delightfully punkish, the one you’ll “love to hate” on the show. Lulav is holding a premiere viewing party Wednesday; call for details at (501) 374-5100.
  • The longest line award goes to Boulevard Bread, whose Mediterranean-inspired table of olives, cheeses and their famous breads were more than most could resist. In fact, I never got any, as my breaks from our own table didn’t afford the long wait. But it was beautiful. (As I write this, I’m munching on my own purchase of Boulevard Bread’s artisan European loaf, nuked with some Monterey Jack on top. Hey, we can’t be fancy all the time.)
  • The best dish, in my humble opinion, was by Chef Daniel Capello of the Chenal Country Club: an amazing pecan wood roasted wild king salmon topped with (!) sea beans on a corn brioche, with garlic aioli and a tomato-corn relish. Capello said the salmon had just been flown in that morning, and however the heck he roasted the thing, it was tender and melty as butter. Remind me to camp out in his kitchen sometime and absorb his awesomeness.

And this is the event that has finally convinced me…If I’m going to do these kind of events for the blog, I’ve GOT to invest in a better camera. I’m thinking a Nikon D90. Any suggestions are welcome. But for now, the ghetto-photos will have to suffice:

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