Looking back at the years when chefs became the stars of charity fundraisers. Plus, one of the city’s most accessible tasting menus, the loss of a great cheese shop and where you can find us at this weekend’s Festival of Books. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.
Why chefs give back
If you’re a chef in this town — or any town, really — you are going to be asked to cook for charity. Even during tough times for restaurants, chefs regularly give their time and food to good causes.
On Sunday, for instance, host chefs Thomas Kalb and Vanessa Tilaka Kalb of Agnes Restaurant & Cheesery will join more than 70 restaurants, bakeries and beverage companies for the Masters of Taste food festival to support the Pasadena-based Union Station Homeless Services. One of fall’s highlight events is L.A. Loves Alex’s Lemonade, hosted by Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne of the restaurant A.O.C. to support kids with cancer.
And last Saturday, one of the year’s biggest give-back events took place for Share Our Strength‘s No Kid Hungry campaign with a powerhouse lineup of chefs from L.A. and around the country — many known to viewers of Bravo’s “Top Chef” and shows on the Food Network.
Chaired by chefs Brooke Williamson, Mei Lin and Melissa King, the Night Out for No Kid Hungry event, which raised $1 million by early estimates, was formidable in scope. More than 60 chefs served bites during a $250-per-person walk-around tasting while a simultaneous $1000-per-person sit-down dinner emceed by actor Anthony Anderson was served with courses by Dominque Crenn, Ludo Lefebvre, Alex Hong, Shirley Chung, Michael Mina and Williamson.
Later in the night, attendees from the tasting and the sit-down dinner came together for dessert and other bites by Duff Goldman and Michael Voltaggio, plus performances by Andra Day, Warren G and DJ SuperNova.
“The thing about Share Our Strength is that they really understand chefs,” says Mary Sue Milliken, who was on the host committee for the sit-down dinner and, along with business partner Susan Feniger, had their Border Grill team serving at the walk-around tasting. “They make it really easy to plug in and use your platform to be impactful.”
She knows better than most. Milliken and Feniger, who run Border Grill at LAX and Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas as well as Alice B. in Palm Springs, were among the original chefs to work with Share Our Strength in the mid-1980s when chef-driven fundraisers were still a new phenomenon.
“It’s the first organization that I recall working with,” says Milliken, who has served on Share Our Strength’s board, co-founded the nonprofit group Regarding Her for women’s entrepreneurs and has contributed her time and resources to many other nonprofit groups.
Founded in 1984 by brother-and-sister duo Billy Shore and Debbie Shore to aid those suffering from famine in Ethiopia, Share Our Strength is now largely focused on ending childhood hunger in this country with robust school meal programs across the U.S. Its fundraising style has also evolved. In its first years, Share Our Strength asked chefs to donate a portion of their restaurant profits to the organization. That wasn’t an easy ask for many restaurants, which often operate on razor-thin margins. Tasting events, which still require a chef to donate their time and food, became the way many restaurant pros preferred to give back.
Share Our Strength founder Bill Shore with some of the 35 chefs who helped cook for a 1998 fundraising event for the organization at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles.
(Iris Schneider / Los Angeles Times)
“I think it was 1987 when Share Our Strength came and said, ‘Would you be part of this tasting?’” Milliken says of the event that became known as Taste of the Nation. “[The fundraiser] was in Beverly Hills and my net worth was, like, $12,000.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is so cool,’” she continued. “I can give back to the community and all I have to do is what I love doing more than anything — which is cook and serve and talk to people. It was a real epiphany for me. I was like, oh, I love this.”
“We now have a donor base, but we didn’t for many years,” Debbie Shore told me at a dinner at A.O.C. last year. “What fuels us is people coming to have an experience and get value back while knowing they’re making a difference in their community. We wanted to involve restaurants because they were the first line of defense.”
Debbie Shore at La Brea Bakery Cafe in 2014 at a No Kid Hungry event in Los Angeles.
(Ari Perilstein / Getty Images)
Of course, the most famous chef-pioneer of this fundraising model is Wolfgang Puck, who with ex-wife Barbara Lazaroff started the American Wine & Food Festival to benefit Meals on Wheels in 1983 from the parking lot of the original Spago above Sunset Boulevard. The event, which lasted more than 25 years, featured star chefs from across the country — including New Orleans legend Paul Prudhomme in the early days. It quickly expanded to the Pacific Design Center and then the backlot of Universal Studios.
By 1985, Ruth Reichl, who was then this paper’s restaurant critic, noticed that the chefs who were reshaping our ideas about American restaurant food — more modern, more seasonal, more local — were being recruited for ever-more charity events.
“Chefs who were asked to give to charity used to send a check, a recipe or a dish,” she wrote at the time. “Now, they send themselves. … Big-name American chefs hit the road for charity with such regularity that many of them have regular road crews.”
“We’re more professional about running these benefits,” Puck told Reichl after admitting that his first Meals on Wheels event raised just $3,000 after the costs of rentals, hotels and travel expenses were factored in.
Larry Forgione, known for his now-closed but hugely influential New York and St. Louis restaurants An American Place — told Reichl in 1985, “I think the most important part … other than raising money for a charity I care a great deal about, is that you get together with all these people. … We’ve all gotten to be friends. And the people we bring with us — the next generation — it’s really wonderful for them to see what’s going on all around the country.”
Milliken gets a lot of her satisfaction working up-close with nonprofits. From her years serving on Share Our Strength’s board, she’s been able to see how a lot of the money she helped raise is being used, sometimes making classroom visits.
“They’ve been so innovative about attacking the hunger problem,” she says of Share Our Strength. “We focused for a couple decades on school feeding programs because they’re really effective — breakfast, lunch, and after school. Then, we started focusing on zero to five, which is such an important age for children and their brain development. That required a whole different set of ways to reach those kids.”
Milliken has been especially impressed with the breakfast-in-the-classroom initiative that Share Our Strength has supported in schools across the country.
“It used to be that if you were poor, you had to come in early to get your breakfast. There was a stigma around it,” she said. “So to see every child in a classroom having the opportunity to have breakfast together after the bell, to make it part of their everyday routine, it’s pretty awesome.”
In recent years, Share Our Strength has again been working on a global level, with an ambitious campaign in India that Debbie Shore is especially passionate about. Some of the group’s work here in this country is about finding ways to cut through bureaucratic hurdles. Milliken says she loves that Share Our Strength helps “connect people in need with federal money that’s already been allocated but is just sitting on the table unused.”
“When I see more thoughtful and forward-thinking work being done,” Milliken says, “that makes me excited.”
See you at the book fest
Senior Food editor Danielle Dorsey with the new L.A. Times Food tote bag from Big Bud Press.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Food’s senior editor Danielle Dorsey and I will be at the L.A. Times Food x Now Serving booth near the L.A. Times Food Stage for both days of this weekend’s L.A. Times Festival of Books. Also making appearances will be restaurant critics Bill Addison and Jenn Harris, reporter Stephanie Breijo, deputy food editor Betty Hallock and food editor Daniel Hernandez. Signing books beside us will be some terrific cookbook authors chosen by Michelle Mungcal and Ken Concepcion of the great L.A. cookbook store Now Serving. You can also buy our new L.A. Times Food tote bag, custom made for us by Big Bud Press, along with Burlap & Barrel spices, sweatshirts and aprons made by Hedley & Bennett. Check the full schedule of food-related signings, demos and interviews here.
L.A. Times Food tote bags, spices, sweatshirts and aprons.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Where to eat now
Electric Bleu’s steak au poivre with a side of fries sprinkled with “electric” salt.
(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)
”Electric Bleu,” writes restaurant critic Jenn Harris in her latest review, “is French food caressed with California seasonality and the occasional pop of Aussie nostalgia.” It’s also home to what Harris calls “the best pâté en croûte in Los Angeles” and “one of the most accessible tasting menus in the entire city.” The five-course menu is $79 and, unlike many other restaurants, the entire table doesn’t have to order it — your friends can go a la carte if they want. The stand-out a la carte dish: steak au poivre, which Harris says is so good it “could put your favorite steakhouse out of business.” With it, she suggests finger-licking fries coated with “electric salt.”
Steak frites with masala au poivre along with a bowl of lamb neck korma at the new Badmaash Venice, where a cocktail program complements new, modern Indian dishes.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Steak and fries is also on the menu at the newest and most ambitious location of the Mahendro family’s Badmaash. “The downtown restaurant Badmaash helped shape how Angelenos enjoy Indian food,” wrote Stephanie Breijo in her most recent report on new openings, “and with a new, reimagined version in Venice, they’re changing the narrative again.” One of the new menu’s highlights: Steak frites served with masala au poivre.
Among the foods to try at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival: lobster fries, a Coachella sunset cocktail, a vegan crunch wrap and loaded prawn chip nachos.
(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; photographs by Danielle Dorsey)
If you’re heading to the second weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, senior food editor Danielle Dorsey was there last weekend and has tips on what to eat and drink, plus a separate guide on Coachella meals for $20 or less.
What to cook
Lima beans with bitter greens
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Novelist and Food section contributor Michelle Huneven came up with a simple and delicious vegetarian meal that centers on bitter greens tempered by what she calls the “cloud-like softness” of luscious lima beans. For dessert, a “surprising and versatile” pineapple tart inspired by a dessert she ate at the Louvre in Paris. I can vouch for the tart — my daughter Isabel made it this week and loved it.
And if you are in the mood for queso, Stephanie Breijo shares a recipe for queso “laced with Thai Panang curry” from “Asian Smoke,” the recent cookbook from “the trio of friends behind Texas and Tennessee restaurant Curry Boys BBQ.”
‘There will still be cheese’
DTLA Cheese Superette partners Reed Herrick and Lydia Clarke in 2023 at the downtown L.A. shop.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Finally, one of my favorite shops downtown closed this week — Lydia Clarke and Reed Herrick‘s DTLA Cheese Superette. Clarke’s passion for cheese always led me to happily buy more than I intended and Herrick’s grilled cheese sandwich has always been one of the city’s best. It’s also the place Jonathan Gold and I first discovered Rodolphe Le Meunier’s Beurre de Baratte back in 2014 when the shop was still at the Grand Central Market. Deputy food editor Betty Hallock talked with Clarke and Herrick about their decision to close and the news that cheese will soon be available to order online and pick up at their downtown wine bar Kippered, which remains open. Visit it! As Clarke put it, “There will still be cheese.”
