When we got a note from the publishers of Douglas Gayeton’s new book Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town telling us that they were planning a nationwide dinner in conjunction with Slow Food USA to celebrate the release of the book, which describes slow living and the slow life, and asking us which restaurants in Columbus would be appropriate, we had no hesitation in responding.  “Italian?”  we said.  “You want to talk to John Dornback at Basi and Kent Rigsby at Rigsby’s Kitchen.”  We didn’t know, at the time, that Kent’s son and sous chef Forbes had broken his ankle; fortunately John and his crew remained intact, and before long we were being cc:ed on messages about organizing the dinner.

Savory chestnut custard

John, of course, rose to the occasion with élan.  The first course on his $39 prix fixe menu was a savory chestnut custard with rosemary and sea salt.  I have to confess, I’ve never been a huge fan of chestnuts:  hearing people wax musical about them roasting over an open fire from my childhood home in California made them sound far better than the reality ever could have been, or in the end turned out to be.  But make them into a custard with sea salt and rosemary, and their subtle dusty bitterness plays beautifully off of the richness of the custard and the salty crust.  A definite win.

Pancetta-wrapped radicchio

Next came the glory—the surprising (to me), unmitigated pleasure—of the pancetta-wrapped radicchio with candied onion and balsamic vinegar.  I never would have anticipated it, but I thought this was hands-down the best dish of the night, and one of the more inspired I’ve had in a long time.  Again, it was a tutorial in how the elements of a dish play well together:  bitterness from the radicchio was dominant, supported by sweetness from the balsamic and smoky salty umami from the pancetta, all bound together with a satisfying textural crunch and heft.  I could have eaten it all night; in fact, when one of my tablemates offered me the second half of one of hers, I fear that I made a bare minimum of effort in offering it to everyone else before accepting.

Wild Boar Ragu with Potato Gnocchi and Braised Millcreek Chicken with Chorizo and Fingerlings

The main course was the only place where diners had a choice of dishes.  I chose the wild boar ragu with housemade potato gnocchi and was rewarded with gnocchi whose sweetness nicely balanced the acidity of the tomato and the pronounced gaminess of the boar.  When John’s wife Trish asked us which of the mains was better, I thought it’d be a tough call—until I tried a forkful of the chicken dish.  Normally chicken is, well, chicken; but as Trish pointed out, it’s a good test of a restaurant’s quality, because in the right hands it can be done amazingly well… and this was.  Meltingly tender, with sweet fingerlings, garlic, and delicious savory chorizo, it was simply delicious.  Tinged with sage and cinnamon accents, it just enveloped you with a warm autumnal glow.

Arborio rice pudding with fig caramel

The dessert, an arborio rice pudding with fig caramel, topped off a delicious evening.  I remember enjoying it, though I fear it was the victim of its predecessors’ success:  so far gone was I in my happy food coma that I neglected to write down a single note about it.

All in all, Basi ended up with something like 90 people on what would otherwise have been a quiet night, and we ended up with a fabulous four-course dinner at a very reasonable price—a win all around.  Our thanks to the publishers for a delicious idea!

When we think of artisanal food in Columbus, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams are always at the top of the list… and Jeni Britton Bauer’s sparkling, bubbling passion for food is amazingly infectious.  So it’s heartwarming to read Jeni’s account of their well-earned writeup in Vogue this month.  Give it a read, and join us in congratulating Jeni and her team!

The indefatigable Andrew Hall has struck again, pitting Ohio wines against their Michigan counterparts in a reprise of last year’s groundbreaking Wine Clash. Now, as then, the focus was exclusively on quality, with an array of judges ranging from sophisticated consumers up to Sommeliers, and on local wine, with an unyielding requirement that all wines be produced from grapes grown in-state.

A few things were slightly different this year, however.

For one thing, last year’s broad array of top wines made people wonder which state had won the competition. (Perhaps the proximity of a certain football game had stirred up their rivalrous tendencies?) For another, the number of categories made it difficult to say which wine was the overall winner.

With those points in mind, Mr. Hall set the wines against each other—an evenly-matched set of 11 from each state—and carefully tallied the scores. You can read about the results in an article written by one of the judges. (Next year, Michigan, next year….)

Why do we find this event to be so exciting? (And we do.) Two reasons stand out. The first is that wine is the neglected stepchild of the locavore movement. Even in California, restaurants that compete to see who can source produce and meat from the closest farmers think nothing of having a predominantly European wine list—a discrepancy that locavores have noticed and find more than slightly annoying.

The second reason is that it’s a great example of taste education in action. Wine is an area in which prejudice and social convention trump taste; put simply, people are often afraid to trust their taste buds for fear of looking or sounding like they don’t know what they’re talking about. (This fear is most readily apparent on first dates.) And following social convention with wine generally means gravitating toward France, Italy, California, maybe Argentina or Spain… but not Ohio or Michigan. But wine experts, who do trust their taste buds, are actually a lot more generous than the general public when it comes to the best of Ohio and Michigan wines. If you really want to surprise some of your friends this holiday season, pick any wine off of this list—doesn’t really matter which one—and pour it for them without telling them where it’s from.

With election day coming up next Tuesday, a food-related ballot issue that may be of great significance to the citizens of central Ohio has been getting a lot of attention: Issue 2, an initiative to create a Livestock Care Standards Board. Our national office has sent us information on the subject. Our friends at other food-related organizations like OEFFA and Local Matters have made their positions clear. We’ve received requests for information about it; people have asked us what our position is, and what we think theirs should be. Our silence on the subject is becoming difficult to sustain. So we thought we should clarify our position.

Slow Food Columbus has no position on Issue 2, except to urge the citizens of Ohio to examine it carefully and to take the time to vote on it.

People on both sides of Issue 2 can agree on one thing:  This is an important issue.  Its implications for good, clean and fair food in Ohio could be very wide-ranging.  It deserves your careful scrutiny and your vote.  Please take the time to do both.

Our position may come as a surprise to those who know us individually and know that, as individuals, we do have positions on Issue 2. But Slow Food, historically, has not been very involved in politics, and the issue of how much it should be has been discussed quite a bit over the past year. From what we have been able to discern, the following statement captures the sense of our members: “Slow Food Columbus is not a political organization. We do, however, stand ready to assist anyone engaged in improving the American food system in a manner that is both effective and consistent with our mission.” Of course, we welcome further feedback from our members on this issue.

We did not anticipate that a question like Issue 2 would arise so soon to test our commitment to this principle. But in a way, we’re glad that it has. Because although all of us are dissatisfied with the status quo in the American food system, and most of us would be very happy if Slow Food USA could help bring about positive change in it, we also see great potential in Slow Food’s ability to bring people together at the table, and we believe that preserving our ability to do so is among our very highest priorities.

How, not whether, to bring about change in the food system, is therefore the issue. The main argument in favor of direct political action, quite simply, is that it works. Indeed, it works so well that it has become the default vehicle for special-interest political lobbies in American politics in the 21st century, and many complaints about the inability of American democracy to overcome the grip of special interests are founded precisely on the power of well-funded Washington lobbyists. Given that a restructuring of the American political order is not realistically in sight, it may be most effective to work within the system as it is currently constructed.

There are, however, many daunting arguments against a transition to a more overtly political mode of operation that are worth considering. First is the point that Slow Food has built up substantial goodwill and respect in large part by remaining above politics, and that losing that goodwill and respect would not only be tragic but would cripple Slow Food’s ability to serve as a nonpartisan actor in the world of food policy. Utilitarian calculations aside, each of us has experienced the instantaneous goodwill and spontaneous friendship of farmers, chefs, and food enthusiasts who have just learned that we belong to Slow Food. If we contrast that experience with the polite reserve and occasional outright hostility encountered by members of (say) the American Civil Liberties Union or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, we can understand what Slow Food might have to lose at the community level.

Moreover, in the political realm, impartiality is immensely valuable, hard to obtain, easy to lose, and, once lost, virtually impossible to regain. Slow Food has largely obtained it by focusing on the table as a meeting place for people of all different persuasions and backgrounds—precisely like the Roman convivia that give our chapters their name. That timeless tradition of bringing people together over food is, arguably, the organization’s greatest strength. Losing it could be both easy and irreversible.

We do believe that change in the American food system is a critical goal, and we recognize that we cannot do so in isolation from the political system. But we are deeply sympathetic to the response of Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini to the question, “Do you intend to be political?”: “Yes,” Petrini replied, “with our own methods.”

hillsmarket @SlowFoodCMH Would you like to do an Ark of Taste tasting with us?

I sat staring at the screen, dumbfounded. I had sent out a message on Twitter a few minutes earlier having to do with the Ark of Taste—Slow Food’s signature biodiversity program, a sort of “endangered species program” for local foods in danger of extinction—but I hadn’t really expected any replies, and certainly not so soon.

And certainly not that reply.

Ark foods are rare. Quite rare. With the exception of a few people like Adam and Jaime at The Wayward Seed Farm, farmers don’t seek them out. And we don’t get many of them in Ohio. It would take a lot of digging on the internet by some very dedicated individual, or a lot of talking with distributors and a lot of work by one of Columbus’ premier markets.

And one of Columbus’ premier markets had just dropped me a line.

I toyed with some possible responses.

@hillsmarket hell yes!!

@hillsmarket you're nuts, but we're game if you are.

In the end I ran the idea by the Chapter Board, which was unanimously enthusiastic, and along with Bethia Woolf (hungrywoolf.com) and Jim Ellison (CMH Gourmand) I went to Hills to meet with Jill Moorhead and the Hills Market crew to hash out the details. Jill had assembled a list that ultimately included about twenty different Ark foods, from an overall list of nearly 200—many of which are not currently available anywhere in the Columbus area. A colonial-era beverage called shrub. Creole cream cheese. 8 flavors of sauerkraut. Amish paste tomatoes. Charbono wine. Limited-edition Jeni’s pawpaw-flavored ice cream.

Food. Geek. Heaven.

The only potential snag was the price. Because a lot of these things required going outside of normal distribution channels, shipping would cost more than the items themselves, so the final price tag looked a bit prohibitive. The Chapter Board discussed it and offered to share the cost in order to bring it down to a level that’s not just affordable but compelling: $5 for members and $10 for nonmembers.

October 22. 7 p.m. Hills Market. Call 614-846-3220 to make reservations.

As I was sitting in ZenCha today sipping a cup of High Street Oolong, I was reminded of the first time, in a tea house, that the proprietor had advised me to re-steep the green tea leaves.  I was a little surprised at this advice, since I was concerned that it might become overextracted and bitter… or simply lose its flavor.  But I followed his advice, off and on, and the results weren’t bad.  To be honest, I never really thought much about it.

Then, one day when I’d gotten to know him a bit better, it occurred to me that his advice had been uncharacteristically forthright for such a quiet person, and I started to wonder whether there might not have been something more behind it than I had realized.  So when I overheard him advising another customer to do the same thing, I asked, “Why do you advise people to re-steep their tea?”

His answer was as simple as it was startling:  “It honors the labor of the farmer.”

I’ve re-steeped my tea ever since.

Sitting there today, I found myself wondering how different our culinary traditions would be if we were less conditioned by food as a product and more attuned, at a fundamental level, with the idea of honoring the labor of farmers in everything we do.  The most obvious implication would be less waste—fewer vegetable scraps thrown out, more creativity in using “extra” parts of animals.  But we’d also have more food, more stocks made from those scraps and parts, and perhaps a revival of some of the kinds of food that were popular back when our ancestors ate these foods more from necessity than from choice… perhaps some of them could even serve as inspiration for chefs.

This, truly, is the event that needs no introduction.

Those of you who remember last year’s locavore dinner at Flying J Farm have been asking us whether it will be happening again. Will Chef John Dornback be cooking again? Will we be having a long dinner table filled with sustainably-raised local meat, delicious fresh bread, and freshly-picked organic produce cooked to perfection? Will we be able to feel the gentle autumn air at our backs as the sun sets over us at the table?

We have some answers for you. And this time, there will be a few surprises.

This is one of them.

For more details, visit our Events page.

Tickets go on sale this Friday at noon, here… as a courtesy, to members only, at first. Tickets for nonmembers, if there are any remaining, go on sale the Friday after that.

If you are a member, you should have received a password by email to use when ordering tickets… but the national office handles membership, we don’t.  If you haven’t received one, contact us a.s.a.p. at events@slowfoodcolumbus.org!

Central Ohio’s fall harvest will occasion not one but two celebrations of local food this year. The first will be the Department of Agriculture’s Local Food Challenge, September 13-19, during which Director Robert Boggs challenges residents to “plan and prepare one meal every day using fresh, nutritious foods that are made, grown, or raised here in our state.” Events include a cooking demo at the Pearl Market on Tuesday featuring local chefs; if the rumors are true, the chef at the demo will be someone at the “Tip Top” of his profession….

The second week will be Local Matters’ Local Food Week, October 3-9, which kicks off on the 3rd with the Market to Market Ride, a bicycle ride from the North Market to Hills Market along the Olentangy River. Breakfast will be available at either market. (And for those who want a full day of local-food goodness, the 3rd is also the date of our annual Locavore Dinner in Johnstown, complete with overnight camping—so once you’ve fueled up at Hills, you could just keep going….)

When it comes to pawpaws, the need for education is apparent. Most people have never even seen one, and when you do a Google image search you get photographs of pawpaws, papayas, some durian-like spiky fruit, and the occasional dog. (Seriously.)

Pawpaws are not papayas. They’re a surprisingly tropical-tasting fruit, sort of a cross between a banana and a mango, with flesh the consistency of custard when they’re fully ripe. Chilled, they were one of George Washington’s favorite desserts. They are also a Slow Food Ark of Taste product, meaning that they are endangered by the industrialization of food: because they bruise easily and ripen quickly, they are less appealing to the food industry than (say) the hardy Cavendish banana. But they have few natural predators, require no pesticides, grow locally… and they’re delicious.

Pawpaw season is upon us, and one of the very best places in the world to sample pawpaws is at the Pawpaw Festival in Lake Snowden, OH. There will be many varieties available to sample and compare. Pawpaw experts, including Slow Food Betsy Lydon Award winner Neal Peterson and Integration Acres’ Chris Chmiel, will be present. There will be other activities too, but the pawpaws are the main attraction.

Join us for breakfast at the Northstar Café in the Short North on Saturday, September 19 at 9:00 a.m., where we will compare notes on how long everyone wants to stay and then carpool or caravan down to the Festival, leaving at 10 and arriving before noon. We will stay until late afternoon, during which time we will cheer on fearless leader Colleen and Hungrywoolf author Bethia, who will be official pawpaw judges at the festival. Those interested in doing so will most likely linger afterward for dinner in nearby Athens. Anyone interested in camping overnight should contact Bethia using the link on the Events page.

Not surprisingly, Slow Food Columbus has from the start had lots of contact with Columbus-area food bloggers. As the city’s arbiters of culinary excellence and intrepid explorers of everything from auberges and bistros to tapas bars and taco trucks, they inspire us, inform us, and often even feed us. They’re one of the best things about the city. It’s hard to believe that they do it just for the sheer joy of doing it.

Well, now you can have the pleasure of getting to know them too. Because no fewer than six of these folks—Jim Ellison from CMH Gourmand, Nick Dekker from Breakfast With Nick, Rose Rings from Bitchin’ in the Kitchen, Dave Scarpetti from weber_cam and Dave’s Beer, Bethia Woolf of Hungrywoolf’s Food Blog, and Becke Boyer from Columbus Foodie—will be at Wild Goose Creative on Summit Street this Sunday, September 6, at 7 p.m. to talk about what they do and offer up samples of food that represent their specialty.

Click here for more details, and come out to say hi. You’ll be glad you did.