Slow Money Saturday: Brunch and Community-Building Continues at The Crest

 

As I was preparing to set my fingers to the keyboard to write this post, something caught my ear as I once again randomly caught a cooking-themed episode of "Charlie Rose." Executive Chef of The French Laundry Thomas Keller said something to the effect of a goal of today's restaurants is to give customers an experience. Restaurants are a place of community and it's there where many memories are made. Somewhere between what stuck out and my own transformation of an already loose interpretation and tired memory (an ethnographic feature when you don't have a recorder, I suppose), I found the James Beard Award-winning chef's comments to aptly capture everything I am about to write. If you choose to stop reading at the end of this sentence, the summary is thus: The Crest Gastropub, alongside every restaurant and foodie event about which I have ever blogged, and will one day blog, strives to give customers an experience.

Music and Food: The Phillip Fox Band and Two Food Experiences in Central Ohio

What do the 2013 Ohio Food Truck Festival and The Granville Inn on every third Thursday of the month have in common? The Phillip Fox Band, of course (okay, technically two of the band members)! On Sunday, September 29th, I made my way over to the latter half of the Ohio Food Truck Festival which took place on the grounds of Ohio Village (the same location of the Country Living Fair I attended last month). It was there that I first heard the proclaimed "country-fried rock'n' roll" persona of the central Ohio-based group, led by native Detroiter Phillip Fox. Fast forward to the more recent present, and yesterday I went to Granville for a quick evening visit to the Inn's Acorn Pub to hear Phillip and Toledo native Jonathan Kampfe, together known as the Phillip Fox Acoustic Duo. Highlighted briefly then are my dining experiences, set to the tunes of local music.

My 25th Birthday and a Return to the Blogosphere

Late night greetings, my foodie friends among you! I cannot believe it has been over a month since my last blog post, though I am most definitely going to pull out my I'm-in-grad-school card. (We will see just how many times it takes before that excuse gets worn out.) In any case, the next few days are quickly going to be particularly foodie-filled. This has prompted me to consider an attempt to catch you up on the past month. I do wish I had more time to give all my food experiences their due justice, but c'est la vie. This being said, I would like to kick things off with this first return post (of perhaps four or five): a Slow Food Columbus "Off the Menu" dinner at The Worthington Inn (which coincidentally timed perfectly with my 25th birthday... wow, time is flying by!).

Saturday Recap: A Day at the Country Living Fair

As I took my first bites of a pulled pork barbecue sandwich, I heard the following from a nearby table: "This is the sixth one. Where have we been all this time? And did you see the individual carts? Clearly we weren't prepared. This year's just the practice round for us anyway." Yesterday was day two of Country Living Magazine's annual fair, which has apparently taken place in Columbus for the past six years. Also to be held in Atlanta, GA (October 2013), and Rhinebeck, NY (June 2014), this weekend's fair--or at least day two of it--brought in an amazing array of talent, ingenuity, and diversity, as well as a great deal of personality. Though I know this post won't do the fair much justice (let alone my own experience), here is but a taste of what went down in this section of Columbus.

Back at The Crest: An Anthropological Experience

The Crest Gastropub (Clintonville)

If you haven't been able to tell, I am a huge fan of The Crest. And yesterday's event solidified that fact even more for me, as if it had much further to go. The sun was shining and the weather was near perfect. I made my way up Crestview and stopped at the restaurant to my right, a general crowd already filling up the interior space. After a little over a week planning for yesterday's happy hour with Chef Dustin and Abed, one of the first things I'm told is that a special keg was brought in for us: a "neolithic" beer for anyone who was interested in trying it. (Let's just say there's a pretty good chance of that happening with a group of anthropologists.) Alongside an "anthropology-themed" menu I, and perhaps quite a few of my anthropology colleagues, have practically been drooling over since it was released, it was in that moment that I fully realised just how much of a great time our first happy hour of the year was going to be.

August Beer Dinner at The Crest Gastropub

Barely a connoisseur of wine, I was both intrigued by--and eager to learn from--the proposition of a beer dinner. The dinner, my notes from which I'd like to share below, was prepared at the transparent and philosophically- and intellectually-charged Clintonville staple The Crest Gastropub. Rooted and inspired by the triple bottom line of sustainability ("environmental, economic, social," also defined as "people, planet, profit", [2]), which I also included in my initial review of The Crest, the entire team continues to gradually teach the general public about this approach to cooking, eating, and business management, without complicating the menu or throwing it in their faces. This third beer dinner, paired with beers brewed locally by Seventh Son Brewing Co., was another perfect example of how we can all do our best as we strive for the sustainable, and certainly tasty, ideal.

Back in Business! (And Busier than Ever)

Oh là là ! It's been a while, eh? For those of you who don't know, I most recently came back from a five-week program via the Experiment in International Living, a return trip to France focusing this time around on language and cooking. I know I'm still far behind on even my first international leadership experience from a few years ago, so for the meantime I'll defer to letting my many photos (linked at the end of this post) do the talking.