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Tuesday, February 7, 2012
‘Mississippi Rising’ Dinner for Project Transitions, Part 2
Part 2 of a three-part posting. Part 1 dealt with the food. Part 3 will share some recipes
Dinner service, cookware and Midwestern ingredients spread neatly over the wide kitchen with its near-commerical Wolf range and poised crew of three brunette women greeting each guest.
Behind a curtain in the tall dining room, a long, narrow table was festooned with candles, flowers and smooth river pebbles. Hand-painted napkins unfolded into maps of the Mississippi Valley.
Hosts Blaise Bahara and Bess Giannakakis certainly know how to set the scene for a benefit dinner party. Their theme for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” on Feb. 4 was “Mississippi Rising: A Culinary Journey Down Ol’ Man River.”
Each year, clusters of hosts around Austin give dinners on the same night to raise money for Project Transitions, the nonprofit that serves people with HIV and AIDS by providing hospice, housing and support.
The scene was not unfamiliar. For several years, our former cooking group, dubbed the Spice Boys, hosted “Guess Who” dinners. The last one was a marvelous frenzy, serving more than 30 guests at the graceful Old West Austin home of Nick Shumway and Robert Mayott.
But Shumway and Mayott moved away, as did the other Spice Boys: Dale Rice, Antonio La Pastina, Sean Massey and Loren Couch. This was the year to get back into the “Guess Who” spirit.
So why a bed and breakfast in Austin?
“I’ve got 10 years of really hard work ahead of me,” she confesses. “I don’t want to spend 14 hours a day over a hot stove. I’d rather spend it making beds and chatting with people.”
The couple rents out four rooms in two structures separated by a pool and spa deck that they added. The house is decorated with historical photographs of Austin and elsewhere, along with reviews of Giannakakis’ last restaurant, which appeared on an episode of the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”
Host Guy Fieri called one of her casual dishes at Colossal Cafe: “Christmas in a sandwich.”
When the pair heard about the Project Transitions series, they jumped right in, setting their table this year for 11.
“Fifty percent of the guests are people we know, fifty percent we don’t know,” Bahara says. “Last year we served food from six countries for ‘Mediterranean Madness.’ Like last time, we’ll stick to small dishes.”
The guests, who were given slips of paper printed with facts about Mississippi Valley’s gustatory bounty to read aloud before each course, attended for a range of reasons.
“This one sounded the most interesting and intimate,” said Adam Holzband of the “Guess Who” dinner selections. “It’s the best way to get to a little closer to the chef and the food!”
“I came last year,” Robin Sanders said. “So I know what a great evening we are in for.”
“We live down the street and watched the changes in the house go up,” Torbin McEwin said. “We were interested in what was inside.”
“Well, I’m on the board of Project Transitions,” Lynn McNeill said. “And I’ve not done one of these before.”
‘I sold them the house!” Angelle Hall said. “And we became fast friends. They dreamboarded really big.”
House painter Eric Frost worked on Gateways Guesthouse.
Not long after the dinner began, with Bahara and Giannakakis making announcements from the nearby kitchen, the stories, jokes and laughter rolled through the room.
Food blogger Jodi Bart, for instance, had won the Whole Foods Foodie Fantasy contest which took her to several culinary regions of Europe and led to her engagement. Such stories came out of that adventure.
Among the most amusing tropes of the evening arose from Kimberly Kohlhaas, who claimed not to have spoken in public since third grade when she mispronounced a commonly mispronounced word.
After that, almost everyone reading from the Mississippi Valley prompts stumbled in some way or another, leaving the whole table heaving with giddiness.
The final toast of many: “To doing it wrong and not caring.”
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