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Thursday, August 13, 2009
A traveling restaurant passes through Austin
Diego Felix and Sanra Ritten are Casa Felix.
Sure, their house-turned-restaurant in Buenos Aires is also called Casa Felix, but for the past three months, they’ve taken their restaurant on the road through North America.
“The restaurant is the two of us,” Felix told me over coffee at Jo’s on S. Congress earlier this week. Felix and Ritten had hosted one of their supper club dinners at Clayton Morgan’s house on Saturday and were en route to the airport, where they were starting the last leg of their cooking tour in California. They were with Austinite Michael Dyer, who helped them host the dinner last week.
Nearly two years ago, Dyer and partner Lesley Boucher ate at Ritten and Felix’s speakeasy-style restaurant when they were on a trip to Argentina. Dyer says they loved the food and even more, the gracious hosts who were doing interesting things with food. “Whenever you come to Austin,” he told them, “give us a call.”
Sure enough, when the chef and his fiancee were setting up this summer’s trip, they planned a stop in Austin.
In May, Felix and Ritten started in Toronto and by the time they were in the Big Apple in June, the New York Times had picked up on their journey and wrote about a dinner they hosted in TriBeCa.
At each stop, including Saturday night’s dinner at Morgan’s penthouse home in downtown Austin, Felix cooks in someone else’s kitchen, using his hosts’ pots, pans, dishes and silverware to create a South American meal with a local twist. His eco-gastronomic philosophy is this: use seasonal, indigenous ingredients to produce dishes with South American cooking methods, techniques and recipes. “There’s nothing better than experiencing people from other places in the world, and in this case, their food styles,” Dyer says.
After a few dinners in California, they will head back to Argentina to host more supper clubs in their home and plan next year’s May to August supper club adventure in the U.S.
First stop? Austin.
Stay tuned to their Web site for details on how you can get a seat.
Photos by Lesley Boucher, George O. Jackson and Addie Broyles.
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