Crowd at Le Grand Fooding, photo by Ben, Guest of Guest.
Last weekend, culinary aficionados from Paris to Brooklyn flocked to MoMA’s P.S.1 for Le Grand Fooding, the progressive French restaurant guide Le Fooding’s tasty two-day mock challenge. The second annual event brought together talented young chefs from New York and San Francisco for a refined smack-down of flavor. All proceeds from the event benefited Action Against Hunger.
The participating chefs brought a stunning array of flavors and techniques to the event’s menu. Guests sampled octopus with charred lemon, a camembert-stuffed hamburger, and suckling pig with summer fruit mostarda, while sipping on bubbling flutes of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label champagne and custom Belvedere cocktails.
All the while Pizza gurus David Scarlow (Pizza Moto, Brooklyn) and Charlie Hallowell (Pizzaiolo, Oakland) worked together to create a mouthwatering wood-oven pizza and Rhone Valley wine pairing. Other chefs, including David Chang (Momofuku, NY), April Bloomfield (Breslin, NY), Laurence Jossel (Nopa, SF), Brian Leth (Vinegar Hill House, Brooklyn), and Daniel Patterson (Coi, SF), plated their seasonal creations under white tents in the contemporary museum’s normally austere courtyard, transformed into a luminous outdoor pique-nique complete with Astroturf, bright orange lounging pillows and clear plastic beach balls reminiscent of champagne bubbles.
Both coasts delivered stunning food, a refined atmosphere and we hope they return to slug it out next year.
Chefs, duking it out, photo by Ben, Guest of Guest.
Jake Gyllenhaal, photo by Ben, Guest of Guest.
Photo by Ben, Guest of Guest.
