At last night’s Taste of the Nation culinary competition, Café Boulud’sZach Bell bested 3030 Ocean’s Dean James Max in Battle Sea Bass, a 15-minute cook-off featuring a wealth of ingredients from a mystery basket unveiled only minutes before the competition started.
A receptive crowd watching the two chefs go at it onstage in Cohen Pavilion at West Palm’s Kravis Center in PBC’s first Share Our Strength-Taste of the Nation benefit to end childhood hunger, which raised approximately $60,000.
The chefs chose from an array of mostly organic ingredients in their identical baskets, beginning with Patagonian Toothfish (the less-than-lovely true name for Chilean sea bass) and including white asparagus, kale, watercress, pineapple, pears and Pinot Grigio, among others.
The results showed why they’re chefs and you’re nuking some barely edible food-like substance in the microwave.
Bell’s winning dish, which earned him two of three votes (including yours truly’s), set small chunks of sea bass poached in Pinot Grigio atop a tart-sweet salad of crunchy kale and diced pear, with a garnish of thin-sliced sautéed red apple and faintly bitter Belgian endive.
Max countered with pan-seared fish on watercress-white asparagus salad with pineapple-chive vinaigrette.
As for the rest of the evening, it showed how far we’ve come, gastronomically speaking, in the past several years. From my own personal favorites—Echo’s Peking duck legs with squares of sweet sticky rice, Four Seasons’ braised short ribs with poached egg on pea risotto—to Kubo’s lobster beignets, Pistache’s braised beef with truffled pain pardu and fattily luscious cubes of maple syrup-glazed pork belly from Dada, the food was as good as at any big-time event I’ve ever attended, from San Francisco to Miami.
Take a bow, chefs. You rocked.
