REVIEW: The South Beach Wine & Food Festival Cookbook
Book reports are definitely not my favorite pastime, as is any homework whatsoever. However, I do love reading a discussing cookbooks. Enter: Lee Brian Schrager's Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival cookbook. Not only does this 250-page bible feature recipes from chefs like Rick Bayless, Daniel Boulud and Ferran Adria, it starts with a kick ass foreword from the infamous Anthony Bourdain and some of the festival's founders fondest memories.
This account is like chef-meets-event-planner-meets-sea-
of-drunken-foodie-festival-goers. Does that even make sense? Read it and you will understand. Flipping through the pages is like actually being there with your feet on the sand and Riedel around your neck, minus the post festival hangover.
My favorite part? I was there! (for lot of it anyway). Schrager's memories pour out on the pages as if he has nothing to hide, and he doesn't.
Founder and Author of the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival
In one of my favorite entries (stuck in between Martha Stewart's Lobster Roll and Cat Cora's Avocado Sandwiches with Mango Coulis) Schrager shares with readers the time that Gordon Ramsay went M.I.A. In summary, the chef known for his outrageous temper, agrees to come to the festival, do a cooking demo and the whole nine yards but simply doesn't show up. According to festival coordinators Ramsay arrived in Miami with no problem, checked in to his hotel, but simply went missing and never attended or participated in any of his agreed-to appearances.
Schrager says, "To this day we do not know what happened."
The book goes on to talk about weather drama, a drunk Maria Batali dropping the F-bomb in front of the King and Queen of Spain and of course, recipes---lots of them.
Ingrid Hoffmann's Frozen Pops
Masaharu Morimoto's Braised Black Cod
Tom Colicchio's Caramelized Tomato Tarts
The New York Times reviews, "No one else does or has ever done what Mr. Scgrager does in the food world. As Bill Graham was to booking rock 'n' roll acts from the 1960s through the 1980s and Switfy Lazar was to closing Hollywood deals during the studio era, Mr. Schrager is to wrangling celebrity chefs. They know him, they love him, they cross oceans for him."
In April I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion featuring Schrager. He was cool, calm and collected. He discussed his love for simple burgers and beer, obsession with the growing Midtown neighborhood of Miami, his dislike of bacon-everything dishes, and the fact that he and his team tried EVERY SINGLE recipe that was published! What a guy!
I recommend the hardback to any and every event planner, chef, student, foodie, and or past festival attendee--all 500,000 of them.
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