Photo: Brian Lee Photography

Updates

Archives

April 2010

Fellow IACPers,

With only a couple of weeks to go until the Portland conference, many great optional dining events still have seats remaining. If you haven’t yet made your Friday and Saturday night dinner plans while in Portland, here are some great options.

In terms of Portland star power, the line-up for this year’s Culinary Trust dinner and silent auction is unbeatable. Producers and chefs will collaborate to create a menu inspired by Oregon’s culinary heritage and influenced by its natural bounty. Join Beard-nominee and Portland’s first lady of food Naomi Pomeroy along with celebrated chefs Jason French and Adam Sappington in a multi-course bazaar of great cuisine, Oregon wines, plus offerings by a top local pastry chef and Portland’s most renowned cheesemonger.

Right across the street from the headquarters hotel in Downtown Portland, the historic Heathman Hotel is a Portland icon and the site of this year’s Wild and Rare dining event. Join Beard winner and Portland godfather of game cookery Philippe Boulot and a talented cadre of local chefs plus IACP featured speaker and Montreal celebrity chef Mario Navarrete Jr. for a five-course feast paired with library wines from the cellars of Oregon’s International Pinot Noir Celebration.

Executive Chef Gregory Gourdet came to Saucebox restaurant after a six-year stint with Jean-Georges Vongerichten in New York City. For his On the Rim: Pacific-Rim Cuisine and Creative Cocktails guest-hosted by Madhur Jaffrey, the New York-born mohawked master of modern Chinese cuisine will utilize seasonal Northwest fish and seafood in modern Pacific-Rim preparations. This event will showcase the city’s new breed of the bartenders who work hand-in-hand with local distillers and chefs to create cocktail pairings for Gourdet’s four-course menu.

Our only Saturday night dining event, the Olympic Provisions Charcuterie Dinner was sold out, but we’ve added an additional ten seats. Portland’s hottest new restaurant, Olympic Provisions is Portland’s first house charcuterie-focused restaurant with an adjacent wholesale curing facility. There, chef Jason Barwikowski and Elias Cairo will showcase five courses including cured artisan meats and more.

Portland is a medium-sized town, but its food amenities rival almost any large North American city. As with any city: without the proper guide, it can be daunting. Our friend local writer Liz Crain recently completed her own useful compendium of Portland’s thriving food scene. Though hardcopies aren’t yet available, Liz and her publisher Sasquatch Books have made electronic copies available to IACP members just in time for conference.

Special Offer for IACP attendees
"The Food Lover's Guide to Portland" by Liz Crain   
Retail price: $17.95
Special IACP e-book price: $9.95
256 pages, b/w photographs

Portland's food scene is one of the hottest in the country, and The Food Lover's Guide to Portland is your complete guide to the goods. Producers, purveyors, distillers, bakers, food carts, farmers markets, and more—get insider's access to the best to eat and drink when you hit Portland for the IACP.

Order your copy online now. Enter discount code IACP during checkout for free delivery of this ebook PDF to your email address. Or call toll-free to order: (800) 775-0817.

We look forward to seeing you in Portland!

Mike Thelin
Host City Chair

March 2010

Announcing the Conference Tweet Fleet!
Heather Jones, IACP Host City Committee Vice Chair

This year, the Local Public Relations Subcommittee had an inspired idea to promote conference on the social media front.  To that end, we announce the Tweet Fleet: a group of seasoned culinary tweeters who will attend conference and tweet about their delicious experiences and discoveries.  Each Tweet “Captain” will tweet a few times a day during conference in their respective category.

Here are the Tweet Captains, their Twitter identity and respective category hashtag:

In case you are new to the Twittersphere, the “username” is how you identify a person on Twitter.  A “hashtag” refers to a specific topic or category.  For example, you will be able to search by the “#IACPchocolate” hashtag to find out what’s happening on the chocolate front during conference.  All of the tweeters will also use the #IACPpdx conference hashtag in their tweets as well, so if you want to know about all the conference-related tweets, search for that hashtag.

Have a question about Portland once you get into town and don’t know who to ask?  The “Local Support” Tweet Captain, The Oregonian’s Leslie Cole, will be your go-to source for members with food-related questions that only a local Portlander would know.

Your assignment - start following our Tweet Fleet and re-tweet, re-tweet, re-tweet!  This is an excellent way to network, and to spread the news about conference and the wonderful workings of IACP to your followers as well.

Also, we still have a few open categories remaining in our Tweet Fleet.  If you will be attending any sessions involving these categories and would like to Tweet about them, please contact Heather Jones [link]: food carts, restaurants, seafood, spirits and wine.

February 2010

Six Degrees of Conference
Lisa Hill, IACP Host City Committee Member

Our personal connections mark some of our most memorable moments and often can have an amazing influence on our lives. As we prepare for this year’s conference in Portland, we asked six local food professionals what IACP’s Annual Conference has meant to them…and a memory or two of how their lives made some twists and turns! Enjoy the connections and hope to see you in April…for a few of your own “A Ha!” moments!

Cathy Whims
Chef/Owner, Nostrana
I’ve made many great contacts through IACP over the years, but two stand out: I met both Bruce Aidells and Faith Willinger in Portland during the conference and later traveled with them extensively in Italy. Faith introduced me to numerous chefs, restaurateurs and food artisans who invited me into their kitchens.  Through a lunch at the New Orleans conference, Bruce introduced me to Kristine Kidd, former Bon Appetit food editor, and she hired me to create chanterelle recipes for the December 2008 issue. The friends I’ve made at the IACP conferences have had such a positive domino effect.

Ken Rubin, CCP
Academic Director – Culinary Arts, The International Culinary School at the Art Institute of Portland
Over the last ten years, the IACP Annual Conference has served as the centerpiece for my own personal and professional growth. Each spring, I look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. I can think back to all of the conferences that I’ve been to in recent years and these recollections form a collage of faces and flavors. Whether I was sipping syrah with Jacques Pépin, slurping oysters with Bill Wallace, or learning how to taste heirloom peaches with Mas Masumoto, this experience of connecting, learning and celebrating food encapsulates the value of conference.

Lisa Donoughe
Director, Watershed Communications
I joined IACP in 1994 and can remember how overwhelming it was in Chicago at my first conference. But the entire trip was worth my two hours at the bar with Debby Maugans, cookbook author, recipe developer and freelance writer from Birmingham, Alabama. Those two glasses of white wine have turned into new business, Christmas dinners together and many other professional and personal projects.  In fact, I was with Debby in Portland at the 1998 conference when I had my “A ha!” moment and decided to take a leap of faith and relocate to Oregon from New York City. Her friendship is invaluable and it’s these individual moments that make conference such a great evolving resource.

Vitaly Paley
Chef/Owner, Paley’s Place Bistro and Bar
Julia…Julia…she is coming to eat …she is coming to eat…what…what is she going to have? What is she going to think? She had oysters, a reuben and fries and washed it down with some local wine and then had cheese with port and then another port, sorbet, dessert and espresso.  She signed her book “The Way to Cook” which she had previously signed 10 years before. Wow…..I will never forget Julia. I also met Fergus Henderson from St John’s in London during the Seattle IACP conference. As a result of that meeting he came to Portland to cook with us at Paley’s Place. During that special evening we fully expressed the values Fergus’s ideas echoed in our cooking: sustainability, respect for a whole animal, and sheer joy. Our souls drew nurture from this meaningful encounter.

Heidi Yorkshire
Director, Food by Hand Seminars
Sure, there are all the obvious "business" reasons for attending any conference, finding ways to make a few more bucks. But every time I've attended an IACP conference, I've benefitted personally in friendships and associations I never could have predicted. Unlike many professional associations, IACP includes an unusually fertile mix of professions: authors, journalists, publicity specialists, representatives of large corporations, educators, entrepreneurs and many others. The largely female membership creates a warm, collegial atmosphere, full of friendly curiosity and mutual assistance. And food just brings out the best in people. There's also the priceless opportunity to meet some of the icons of the culinary world. One great moment among many: a brief conversation several years ago with Julia Child, gracious and kind, a memory I treasure.

Barbara Dawson
Owner, In Good Taste Cooking School
The IACP conference is a great place to network and learn from your peers. I always leave each conference totally energized with new ideas, new enthusiasm and new friends. At the Seattle conference, a group of small, locally-owned cooking school managers from the Pacific Northwest sat together at lunch during the conference. We realized immediately that we have a lot in common and could work together to grow our cooking schools. We’ve followed that first meeting up with a meeting in Portland to plan how we would work together, and we communicate often via e-mail and phone. Since then, we’ve collaborated on bringing visiting guest chefs to the region by sharing expenses and experiences. From this unremarkable beginning at the lunch table at conference, we have grown a strong network amongst our local cooking schools. The connections I’ve made at the conferences have been invaluable to my business.

January 2010

Do You Eat and Tweet?

The Portland Conference Public Relations Subcommittee is looking for Tweet Captains.  We would like to find people who have experience/knowledge in specific areas who can tweet three to five times per day about their findings as they discover Portland during the April Conference. 

Categories include:  Beer, wine, spirits, chocolate, cheese, restaurants, farms/farmer's markets, coffee, food journalism, blogging, cookbooks, chefs, and food carts.

If you already tweet for your profession, this will be a great way to acquire more followers as your Twitter user name will be published as a Tweet Captain just prior to conference.  If interested, please email a brief (150 words max) description of your background to Lisa Donoughe.

Heather Jones
Host Committee Vice Chair

December 2009

Dear Fellow Members,
 
For culinary professionals, the IACP Conference is homecoming week: a culinary camp where veteran professionals reunite, where old friends swap war stories and commiserate, and where first-time conference goers make connections that often prove to be life altering. For first timers, an IACP conference can seem a daunting situation to walk into, but it needn't be. All it takes is a little gumption.

IACP offers no greater opportunity during the year to rub shoulders with colleagues, mentors, and potential clients.  The professional development is immeasurable, and for people who are new to IACP, to conference, or to the food world in general, conference presents a priceless opportunity to network.

In the brief time that I've been helping plan the events for the April conference, I've experienced so many fruitful happenings that offer a glimmer of the possibilities for 2010.  So if you're on the fence, and still weighing the pros and cons of attending conference in Portland, know that there many compelling reasons to join us, namely, our list of 2010 conference luminaries.

Heather Jones
Host Committee Vice Chair
View 2010 IACP Annual Conference Featured Speakers
 

November 2009

Fellow IACPers,

I’d like to take another minute to introduce our city of Portland, Oregon as seen and enjoyed through the eyes and experiences of host committee members, who are busy preparing an unforgettable conference in 2010. Portland is one of the top destinations for eating and drinking in the country, and we believe it will be an outstanding backdrop and playpen for all of you during our 2010 conference, The New Culinary Order. But don’t believe me. Take it from the local experts, the hard working culinary professionals on the Portland host committee.

See you in April,

Mike Thelin
Host City Chair

I love that in Portland, ingredients rule. It starts with our fantastic farms and ranches and fishing operations that grow and raise and catch perfect food. Then you have our unbelievable farm markets, plus really strong specialty shops and the best grocery stores anywhere, so anyone has access to all that great stuff to cook with. And then at the restaurant level, the city’s chefs source their food with skill and intelligence and they really know how to let the ingredients shine. You don't see that in other cities, and boy do you get spoiled by it!

     Martha Holmberg, Food Editor, The Oregonian

Oregon has 225 commodities, making it one of the most agriculturally diverse states in the nation.  We are the top national producers of hazelnuts, blackberries, black raspberries, boysenberries, Logan berries and storage onions;  second in peppermint, spearmint, hop, prunes, plums and snap beans, and third in the production of pears, sweet cherries, blueberries, strawberries and green peas for processing.  The short turn-around time for the field to the kitchen is what makes our burgeoning restaurant scene so viable and why it’s such a great place to live as a cook.  Oh, and did I mention the wine country is only 45 minutes away and the Pacific Ocean an hour and a half?

     Janie Hibler, Author and former IACP President

Portlanders are polite, people don’t honk and it’s easy to get a good meal.   This is a place where the quality of ingredients are a given at all kinds of establishments.  At a local bakery, the tomato relish for the egg sandwich is going to be made from scratch, the carnitas at a street cart taqueria are going to be from a small, family farm, and the martinis at a 4-star restaurant most likely will have gin from one of our amazing micro-distillers.  Building flavor from local ingredients into every category of cuisine is part of the city’s value system.  Bring your fat jeans.

     Lisa Donoughe, Watershed Culinary Communications

I love the ingenuity behind the food scene in Portland, and the acceptance of the dining public to embrace well-executed new ideas.  Two Tarts started selling their doll-sized cookies at the farmer’s market, and now they have a bakery in the popular NW 23rd  Avenue shopping district.  Andrea Spella served perfect little cups of espresso from his Spella Caffe food cart, and now he’s opening in a storefront.  This is where brilliant culinary concepts incubate, blossom and thrive, and I adore being a part of it, just in the brief time that I’ve lived here. 

     Heather Jones, Heather Jones Consulting

I pinch myself every time I return from a trip, step off the plane in Portland, and realize how fortunate I am to have picked such a beautiful place to live. The natural beauty of Oregon—the mountains, coastline, Willamette Valley, and warm character of Portland—is what brought me here, but the food scene over the past decade has simply astonished me. From the bustling farmers’ markets, to the winemakers, distillers, brewers, cheesemakers, chocolatiers, coffee roasters, talented chefs with amazing restaurants and specialty food shops, Portland is a food lovers’ paradise. I hope IACP attendees come early and stay longer to explore the bounty of Portland and the lush areas beyond.

     Diane Morgan, Cookbook author

Chefs here know farmers by first name. A bartender will start his own distillery. Winemakers focus on biodynamic growing. In Portland, we’re obsessed with our food and drink and where it comes from. That’s why we have the most craft breweries per capita in the world, a neighborhood dubbed the “Distillery District,” and innovative chefs flocking here to source produce and animals nurtured on the fertile land. Fine wine, coffee, and tea, too. It’s no wonder that Portland is a new Mecca of modern American cuisine. I’m eager for the culinary world to come here and experience our indie-epicurean lifestyle.

     Andrea Slonecker, Journalist and Person about town

This is why I love Portland: I walk with my shopping tote to "my" market and the first person I see is Michael Martinez, who makes me a breakfast burrito with farm fresh eggs, and green chili sauce from chilies he grew himself. Then it's off to Alsea Acres to talk to Jim. His feta is so creamy that I eat it by the spoonful. It starts to drizzle and everyone just keeps shopping un-phased, as their kids dance to the jazz band at the far in the parking lot. I shuffle home, and no one even notices I’m still in my pajamas.

     Ivy Manning, Cookbook author, freelance writer

 Archived Updates

March 2010: Announcing the Conference Tweet Fleet

February 2010: Six Degrees of Conference

January 2010: Do You Eat and Tweet

December 2009: Conference Featured Speakers

November 2009: Local Experts on Portland

October 2009: The Host Committee Invites You to Portland This Spring 

August 2009: IACP Visits City Hall

June 2009: Planning Begins