Dinner parties with wine experts, restaurant owners/mangers, and chefs aren’t like your commonplace soiree. We don’t cater (unless it’s our friend that’s doing the cooking), we don’t go as a group to a favorite restaurant (unless it’s our friend that’s doing the cooking), we don’t use mixers for cocktails, and we most certainly don’t drink plonk wine. Rather, these after-hours events are more like being invited to an underground dinner club or pop-up speak easy—where there’s an abundance of food, great music, and an obscene amount of impeccable wine and hand-made cocktails.
Food industry parties–not the kind attended by press and marketed to create a buzz, mind you, just a little get together of friends—are Dionysian affairs where off-the-clock servers grin a little bigger, sommeliers share favorite wine stories and their best off-color jokes, and the chefs cook and eat food with nonchalance. Though these are intimate gatherings-they are the kind of party you wish you could watch on TV.
Be it spur of the moment get together or well-executed culinary bash—we restaurant folk go the extra mile to celebrate our day off by eating and drinking well and just relaxing. Crash one of our parties and you’ll see a group of people happy to be free of their uniform and outside of the demands of customers. Really, really happy.
You can feel a kind of excitement in the air when you spend a night off with fellow industry folk. I imagine the dinner party fireworks of food and wine professionals are similar to the electricity between rock stars backstage, or in the dug out with baseball players. Put a group of people together who are in love what they do, and sparks will fly. If you look carefully, you can even pick up on the embers of exhilaration floating through the air*.
You can take a restaurant pro out of a restaurant but you can’t take the restaurant out of the restaurant pro
Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to be invited to an extraordinary backyard happening called “Lambalooza”, an event so named by its originator and co-host, Dan Perelli (friend, wine expert, and employee of the Wine Hotel). The eleven-course tasting menu was hosted at the home of Ben Anderson, a wine representative of Rosenthal wines and was organized by Sara Gim of Tastespotting. Dan was the mastermind behind the event that celebrated great wine and every tasty morsel of a whole Colorado prime lamb.
The moment I entered the backyard patio, I knew I had been invited to a remarkable dinner. Past the apartment’s back gate, I found a circle of excited sommeliers and wine professionals standing guard over a high-top table littered with open bottles and tasting glasses.