7 minute read
Liver Mousse, Bison Sliders, and Tagine: A Taste of the KFWE Experience
The Kosher Food & Wine Experience (KFWE)
returned on Tuesday, March 1, after a year off due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the format was certainly very different from the 2021 version, the 2022 vintage wasn’t quite the same as the 2020 one, either.
In the past, the much-anticipated event had been held in New York and featured an extensive selection of restaurants and cuisines to pair with perhaps an even greater selection of wines and other alcoholic beverages. Last year, the pandemic caused the event to be relegated to an online stream and kits that were sent to people’s homes featuring several small bottles of wine with instructions on what to pair them with.
This year, the event moved to New Jersey, and the food was consolidated to four main stations with some dessert options for those with a sweet tooth. The sold-out ballroom at the Hilton Meadowlands in East Rutherford, New Jersey, was packed with people trying to put the pandemic behind them and get back to the old days when KFWE was the pinnacle of the kosher food calendar every year. FWE is the top kosher food and wine event
Kin the world and usually takes place in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, and Israel on a yearly basis. With a fifteen-year history of great events, many were excited to see how the new format would compare to past events. There were also those who were rather indifferent to the changes and were there to just enjoy a great night out.
One of the biggest differences was the lack of the two-tiered system that defined the experience in past years. Previously, a VIP section would include some of the higher-end options at the event, and tickets would be limited and sold for a higher price. This year, KFWE made the decision to go with a single tier where everybody could feel like a VIP as some of the top chefs in the world would be responsible for a greater percentage of the food. The event was also stretched to six hours in order to give people a wider range of times to attend.
Before the event, Royal Wine (the leading sponsor of KFWE) announced that they would be donating a minimum of $30,000 to Emergency Ukraine, a Canadian charity that has been helping the Jewish communities in several Ukrainian cities during their current conflict with Russia. The donation will include all proceeds from Xdar, a Ukrainian vodka, and Lvov, a Polish vodka. Both of the brands included in the donation were featured at KFWE and are two of their top selling vodka brands.
The four food sections that were featured this year were inspired by Californian, French, Mediterranean, and Japanese cuisines. Each section provided attendees with a wide range of items to sample, from dishes that were appetizers to those that were scaled down versions of main entrees (to better allow everyone to try as many dishes as possible).
The Californian selection was orchestrated by Chef Gabe Garcia. As head chef at Tierra Sur, the restaurant located at the Herzog Wine Cellars in Oxnard, California, Garcia runs what is considered to be one of the top kosher restaurants in the world. His menu for this event was a diverse array of flavors that perfectly blended New American fare with a distinct taste of California.
Garcia said his favorite menu item was the Veal Carnitas. This amazing combination of flavors was made with slow-cooked pulled veal in a mini tortilla with pickled red onions, fresh radishes, an avocado salsa verde, and micro cilantro.
“You can really taste everything I’m trying to do in the carnitas,” Garcia said with a passion in his voice. “Those flavors remind me of home.”
Some of the other most popular items from the California section included the Bison Slider (boondocks bourbon hickory glaze, onion strings, dijonnaise) and the Korean Fried Chicken (shaved cabbage, pickled daikon, kimchi mayo).
Michael Schick is a 25-year veteran of the catering business and oversaw the French cuisine at KFWE. His business, Catering by Michael Schick (based in Brooklyn) is well-known as a superior provider of unique cuisines with spectacular presentation. His additions to KFWE certainly did not disappoint.
When asked which dish was his favorite, Schick offered up perhaps the most interesting dish of the night, the Chicken Liver Mousse. Even those who might be familiar with the idea of mousse made from chicken liver had likely never tasted it while using a chicken skin chicharon as a delivery method. That is, a deep-fried piece of chicken skin used kind of like a cracker to dip the mousse in.
“I think that chicken liver mousse is such a fun thing to make because it gets people to expand their palates,” Schick said with the sophistication of a professor. “It’s not something you can find everywhere, so I’m glad we have it here tonight.”
One other offering at the French counter that was a big hit with those in attendance was the Cassoulets, made with veal meatballs, duck sausage, tomato, and beans.
On the Mediterranean side of things, Chef Michael Solomonov was providing an interesting assortment of flavors from all types of cultures. Solomonov has a preposterously long list of accomplishments that include four James Beard Awards in different categories and Bon Appetit’s “Dish of the Year” for his hummus. He is seen as an ambassador for modern Israeli cooking.
As his selection for his personal favorite bite of the night, he chose the Moroccan Tagine Chicken. He used chicken thighs, apricots, potatoes, and olives to construct the dish that is traditionally cooked in an earthenware pot and remarked on how diverse the dish was.
“It’s my favorite because it’s great however you eat it,” he said before giving some examples. “It’s really good cold, which people might not expect. Plus, you can take the leftovers and make them into an incredible sandwich the next day.”
Not to be overlooked, Solomonov also made an incredibly tender Yemenite Short Rib that was served over jeweled Persian rice. Guests were dazzled by the giant racks of ribs being shuttled into the station to make this dish possible, with many going back for multiple portions of the bite-size chunks of meat.
The sushi was provided by Sushi Tokyo, a chain of popular sushi restaurants that includes five locations spread across Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Long Island, and upstate New York. Owner Chaim Lipsitz was on-hand to manage the station and discuss some of his unique offerings with those in attendance.
Their buffet included more than just sushi, with other types of items from their extensive menu available to sample. But, in the end, Lipsitz said his favorite thing there was one of Sushi Tokyo’s classics.
“It’s the Tokyo Roll for me,” he said with pride. “It’s got a little bit of everything going on packed inside one roll.”
He’s certainly right about that. The Tokyo Roll is a cooked salmon roll that features sweet potato and avocado on the inside, spicy tuna on the outside, and a topping of crunchy onions and a drizzle of Sushi Tokyo’s special sauce. There’s a lot going on, but it comes together well.
The Lawrence Roll was also hard to keep on the tray. A black pepper tuna roll with avocado and crunch on the inside, spicy salmon on the outside, and crunchy onions and sweet sauce drizzled on top, it seemed to be the other favorite at the buffet.
As if all these selections weren’t enough, there were also some dessert options for the attendees to peruse. Fruits by Pesha (based in Brooklyn) had a truly impressive display of dehydrated options that seemed to include pretty much every fruit imaginable, and Elegant Desserts NY had pareve ice cream popsicles with a buffet of coatings that you could add yourself. There was also a trio of cookie options that were packed to go for the crowd to take home.
The element of the evening that remained unchanged in comparison to non-2021 years past was the alcohol selections. The 63 different booths at the event featured offerings that included pretty much every wine you could think of, some hard liquor selections like bourbons and vodkas, and myriad interesting options like hard seltzers and alcohol-infused tubes of slush.
The crowd was invited to walk around with their KFWE-branded wine glasses and taste whatever they’d like, one ounce at a time. The glass was a souvenir for everyone to take home.
While nobody knows what the format will be for KFWE NY 2023, some participants could be heard speculating and giving their opinions on if they favored this year’s format or those of the past.
They say that if you have two Jews in a room, you have three opinions. In this case, there were hundreds of Jews, but they all agreed on one thing: people can’t wait to have more events like this once again.
