What you missed at SHEF Food + Wine in Grand Prairie
The Shef Food + Wine Fest— from celebrity chef Tiffany Derry, business partner Tom Foley and their business T2D Concepts— is a culinary and beverage event drawing chefs, culinary enthusiasts, and your serious foodies out from around the country and beyond! This is the third annual festival.
Here's how the festival went for Raven Writes DFW:
Fireside Chat with Carla Hall and Kristen Kish took audience on a ride of experience, family, recipes, and what last made them cry
I started the weekend off with the Fireside Chat with Kristen Kish and Carla Hall. They discussed journey to Top Chef, overthinking compared to underthinking, and food memories of meatloaf so good it could make you cry (nod to Carlas mama's meatloaf).
Kish hosts Top Chef now, which was formerly Hall's spot. Kish overthought the career path while Carla underthought, as Kish said.
"With Top Chef, you want personality, you want agreat representation of our industry, but you also want to make sure people can cook," Kish said. "That is a very tough job. So giving them that plus being able to cook? Jackpot."
One of many points that stood out in Kish's book, Accidentally On Purpose, was not repeating the same outfit in 10 days time during her childhood and constantly pushing herself to feel good enough.
But then the two both circled back and said the overthinking still manifested.
"Admittedly, the over-underthinking part was me being at one spiritually; that's how I prepared for it," Hall said. "I was heavily into meditation at the time, and I was like how can I realize this experience and have it be authentic to me, that was my only prayer."
Juke Joint transports attendees back in time
After the talk, I headed over to the Juke Joint. The first thing that came to mind when seeing this on the schedule? Sinners. Then another attendee gave a different film perspective— The Color Purple. Interesting!
However, juke joints are based on very real historical functions for community, dancing, drinking, and eating that took place in the South during the Jim Crow era.
The Juke Joint event featured a live jazz band, DJ, wax-bottom cups from Makers Mark, and eats like duck fat chicken wontons, wagyu short rib bao, and Cajun shrimp toast from acclaimed chefs including Kenny Gilbert, Shirley Chung, Tobias Dorzon, Kevin Lee, and Samir Dhurandhar.
Passed desserts featured colorfully decorated macarons and ice cream sandwich bites.
Guest Chef Panel offered lessons on resilience and pursuing dreams in spite of pushback from others to aspiring chefs in training.
The panel was moderated by Erick Williams and featured panelists Ope Amosu, Nyesha Arrington, Tavel Bristol, and Simone Byron.
Finally, Saturday's highlight event was the Grand Tasting, which was a lineup of fine dining, global flavors, and bold wines collided into one noteworthy expierience on two floors.
Some of the dishes included juicy oxtails, prawn incased in a crispy toast, seared scallops, cannolis, jollof, and so much more.
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