Travel

Choi to the world

Notes from the fifth annual Pebble Beach Food & Wine festival:

LA chef Roy Choi served his Sunny Spot pig’s feet at Friday night’s afterparty and cooked at a Food & Wine magazine Best New Chefs alumni dinner on Saturday alongside LA pal Ricardo Zarate of Picca. But he could have been even busier on Twitter.

Choi (@RidingShotgunLA) posted photos with chefs including Jacques Pepin, Michelle Bernstein (“My Miami Boo”), Masaharu Morimoto, Paul Bartolotta, Michael White and Charles Phan of San Francisco’s Slanted Door and also tried to respond to as many people who wrote him on Twitter as possible.

Choi, new to Twitter, has vowed to follow anyone who follows him. Earlier in the week, he hit 500 followers and tweeted that he would buy a round for any follower who found him at his Kogi truck or one of his restaurants, which also include Chego and A-Frame. “Just step to me,” he wrote.

Not long after, Anthony Bourdain (whose line of books at HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint is publishing Choi’s forthcoming memoir/cookbook, “Spaghetti Junction: Riding Shotgun with an LA Chef”) urged his 800,000-plus Twitter followers to follow Choi. Just like that, Choi was well over 1,000 followers and the chef realized he couldn’t quite keep up with all his online fans.

“To all you new friends. Thank you,” he tweeted. “I’m a cheap date but not an easy lay. I want to get to know you. I just got to know the OG’s. Gimme time.”

But Choi isn’t one to stop hustling even when overwhelmed. Food-industry folks who ran into the chef over the weekend told us he urged them to follow him on Twitter.

Around the festival

* Dean Fearing of Fearing’s at the Ritz-Carlton, Dallas and Tim Love of Fort Worth’s Lonesome Dove Western Bistro and Love Shack had their game faces on at a lunch they cooked together at the Lodge at Pebble Beach. Fearing served chicken-fried Lockhart quail, and Love made seared elk saddle. Good hangover remedies both.

* Overheard at the grand tasting: “What’s Tim Love going to do with that extra roasted goat?” Answer: Take the entire animal to what Food & Wine magazine publisher Christina Grdovic called a “special VIP area” of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas pop-up party at the Inn at Spanish Bay two hours later, break it down with his bare hands and let the happily surprised crowd make their own “badass tacos with cabrito and pickled chilies.”

* Sang Yoon of LA’s Lukshon brought bold flavors and slow-cooked joy to the grand tasting with his 48-hour braised short rib. The savory/spicy/sweet combo featured black bean ghee, “savory mochi” grilled rice cakes and scallion/kohlrabi/Asian pear dressed with kimchi vinaigrette.

* Was it breakfast, dinner, dessert? Who cares? At the opening-night reception, Mark Sullivan of San Francisco’s Spruce proved that Hudson Valley foie gras over a vadouvan waffle with strawberries and pistachio works. (We weren’t as sure about Morimoto’s black truffle and bacon marmalade mochi with toasted hazelnut, but the crowd seemed to be into it.)

* Michael Chiarello of Napa Valley’s Bottega served spicy ’nduja on bruschetta with roasted broccoli rabe, proving again that spreadable sausage wins every time.

* Christopher Kostow of Napa Valley’s Restaurant at Meadowood got playful with texture, merging geoduck and lardo in a dish he called “pasta.” It was far from al dente. It was good.

* The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas’ star mixologist, Mariena Mercer, took afternoon cocktails to another level by hosting a hands-on seminar where a crowd including Wynn Las Vegas chef Paul Bartolotta mixed their own drinks. Next time you’re at the Cosmopolitan’s chandelier bar, it’s worth trying the Verbena with Patron silver, ginger syrup and yuzu sour. Say hi to ace bartender Brandi Calhoun for us.

* Bartolotta, not surprisingly, brought seafood from Italy to the “Italian Love Affair” dinner. He opened the dinner with a warm Ligurian red mullet salad with capers, Taggiasca olives and roasted bell peppers. There were latecomers at our table, which ended up with two extra servings of mullet. Everybody at the table, including many locals tasting Bartolotta’s food for the first time, was thrilled to have a little extra.

* Tyler Florence rewarded the crowd who woke up for his 10 a.m. Sunday cooking demo by serving pozole with pig’s ears, sous vide egg and serrano chilies. Florence, charming and quick-witted, also had fun talking about topics including why he moved to California (more affordable real estate than what he could get in New York was a big reason), his organic Sprout baby-food line, his wine collaboration with Robert Mondavi and how he makes his popular fried chicken at San Francisco’s Wayfare Tavern. But who else calls Tabasco sauce “McIlhenny Tabasco” sauce? Let’s give Florence the award for World’s Most Brand-Conscious Chef.

* Yes, that was Guy Fieri at Friday night’s afterparty carrying a bench to the dance floor so a dwarf could boogie on top of it. Stay classy. Of course, we suppose now is the moment to admit that we were one of the people who drank straight from Fieri’s Jack Daniels bottle the night before. Hey, Daniel Boulud did it first.

* Spago pastry queen Sherry Yard made a cake for nose-to-tail meat maven Chris Cosentino’s 40th birthday. It was pink and shaped like a pig. The head got ripped apart pretty quickly.

* Festival founders David Bernahl and Robert Weakley of Coastal Luxury Management also own the 1833 restaurant in Monterey, at the space that once housed chef Brandon Miller’s fine Stokes eatery. And chef Levi Mezick’s 1833, which San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer says “serves the best casual food in Monterey,” was the talk of the town all festival. Chefs including Michael Ferraro of New York’s Delicatessen and MacBar held court there with lots of absinthe on multiple nights.

* After Bernahl and Weakley recover from all the Pebble Beach shenanigans, they’ll be hard at work putting together their Los Angeles Food & Wine festival. That extravaganza, with many culinary surprises planned by new executive director Caryl Chinn, is August 9-12.

A tribute to Keller

Best bite at the Thomas Keller tribute dinner: Nancy Oakes of San Francisco’s Boulevard made roasted California squab with smoked mushroom risotto venere, bacon and morels.

Best freestyling at the Keller dinner: Knowing it would be hard to replicate one of his popular spaghetti dishes for 180 people, Michael White used saffron gnocchetti instead of tossing spaghetti for his blue crab and sea urchin pasta. Nobody complained.

Most inspiring moment: After a video tribute to Keller (where Daniel Boulud playfully called Keller out for naming a restaurant Bouchon before the Lyon-born Boulud could do it himself), the French Laundry and Per Se mastermind told the crowd that even at 35, after he failed at restaurants in New York and California, he questioned whether he should still be a chef. Keller prevailed, and the food world is lucky. Keller’s table, full of proteges who weren’t cooking that night but were there to pay homage, included Grant Achatz and San Francisco’s Corey Lee, who was just named a Food & Wine magazine Best New Chef for his work at Benu.

Getting fresh Down Under

Geoffrey Zakarian, who cooked a festival dinner alongside fellow Iron Chefs Michael Symon and Masaharu Morimoto, raved about a recent trip to Australia.

The newest Iron Chef, whose restaurants include the Lambs Club and the National in New York and Tudor House in South Beach, was delighted by the food in Sydney, which reminded him “of California in the late ’80s,” back when Alice Waters was in her prime and Michael Chiarello was hitting his stride. “It was food before the foam hit,” Zakarian says.

And while Zakarian did find some foam in Australia, meals at Matt Moran’s Chiswick and Neil Perry’s Rockpool had him thinking about the purity of good ingredients. He enjoyed Chiswick’s pickled garden vegetable plate and wood-roasted lamb shoulder (“with a fancy version of chimichurri”) from the Moran family farm and Rockpool’s “amazing beef finished with sea salt and lemon, really unusual but it really works.”

“These restaurants really showcased the terroir of the product,” Zakarian says.

Just don’t call it farm-to-table. The Iron Chef could do without that term. “We were doing farm-to-table in Le Cirque in 1985. But we didn’t call it that. It was a guy driving the truck to New York.”

Zakarian was also impressed by Sydney’s new Star casino (where he spent time with David Chang, who just opened his first overseas restaurant there; the resort also has a new Marquee nightclub) and even more blown away by Melbourne’s Crown casino with its “spectacular location” on the south bank of the Yarra River.