When did I become a foodie?

One of the things that has nudged me over the line and into full-fledged foodiedom was seeing Lachlan MacKinnon-Patterson at work. I volunteered for a shift serving food from Frasca that turned into a fiasco and cost the restaurant and the festival some goodwill points at the end of the Boulder International Film Festival.

I had been getting interested in food and film and thinking it might just be time to come up with something no one has seen before: some kind of happening, multimedia and participatory without having to be explicitly democratic. And I happened to know the co-owner of the restaurant, so I dropped in and pitched it. Lachlan was all over it immediately; his partners, Bobby Stuckey and his wife Danette were a little more cautious, given that they'd be getting back from an appearance in Aspen only hours before the event. But Lachlan loved the opportunity to make a splash in the community, and everyone involved with the festival gave me big wet ones for a while for getting Frasca to cater the closing-night dinner. I was feeling like hot stuff.

So I used my sealing of the deal to leverage a position on the serving staff. I would get to work for Frasca for a day, which sounded like big fun to me. We were to be trained the day before the event. This meant we listened to Lachlan describe the menu and learned what stations we would be working. It was fascinating to see the exactitude with which he envisioned the event unfolding, especially in light of what happened later.

But for now, he described the chill of the spoons we would use to serve what was essentially a squeeze of deviled egg and a squeeze of tuna crudo, the proportion of beets to foamed soup that he wanted served in shot glasses but no one could come up with 700 of them at once four weeks before the event.

We learned how the meatballs were made, and saw the desserts: the ice cream popsicles and foil-wrapped chocolates, the latter alone a symbol of many hours of labor.

And we learned what a perfectionist Lachlan is. He described how everything had to stay clean, perfect, spotless. How Frasca had to be shown as gracious, elegant, and perfect at all times, in all facets.

I found this an easy task: I'd been a fan since their second day, if not before. We happen to know one of the owners in another context.

So please let me say now that if I knew what I knew later about Lachlan I would never have asked him to feed our cats. At the time, all our neighbors were out of town and a friend had recently let me down in the pet-feeding department and I felt I had no other options.

Now I'm horrified that I let such a perfectionist see our grubby catbox area. He probably hopes he never has to set foot in here again, and it's looking likely that it will work out that way. We just don't travel in the same circles.

But back to the event: By the time six o'clock on Sunday night, the witching hour, arrived, we had spoons of tuna and egg freshly served on several spoons and awaited the first tricklings of people. Within five minutes of the doors' opening, it was mayhem, and we were all going as fast as we could.

This initial training on the menu and the restaurant demonstrated how seriously Lachlan took cleanliness. This session was followed another by another brief training on the actual food, although the demo (a.k.a. tasting) never really materialized. I made sure I sampled everything, curious as always about the chef's combinations, which were delicious. In doing so, however, I totally pissed off my friend, who was managing the event and felt undermined by my independent action; in my mind I was just getting the demo we'd been promised earlier.)

We worked like dogs to serve the people crowding and flailing their plates at us. We had stacked up plates and been told not to let people get the plates for themselves, but that went right out the window and suddenly everyone had a plate and was trying to squeeze themselves into the funnel that was the front of the theater.

Some people tried to laugh and remain gracious; some people turned all-business, like Lachlan's then-fiancee Allison, owner of a fine cafe for a while just east of the Pearl Street Mall and down the street from Frasca. And some people got greedy, taking several little paper cups of beets in hot manchego cheese foam soup, or several spoonfuls of the tuna and deviled egg with French salt or grabbing three of the chocolates.

Well, by the time seven rolled around we were out of everything and by seven thirty we had distributed the popsicles and desserts. Too bad for the people who arrived later; it was over by then.

I scoured the theater afterward for the trash, which turned out to be copious. This had been one of Chef Lachlan's concerns but it just wasn't avoided in the end, so there were plates and popsicle wrappers and foil and paper cups and plates and drinks glasses that several of us tried to pick up before they even dropped but inevitably missed many more that we had to return for on subsequent rounds. We tried to make up for the amount of stuff by being quick and ubiquitous with the trash cans but may have wound up being irritating. Just before the closing night ceremonies began, among the edgy crowd circulating and buzzing about how Frasca's contribution should have been called a tasting menu, Joanne Grillo seemed adrift on her own ice floe as we brown t-shirt-clad representatives of the restaurant that wasn't looking so perfect any more circulated relentlessly.

Everyone had a different perspective on what happened, what went wrong, and how things could have been done better. This served only to further piss off my friend, part of the events committee that organized the Frasca event only to see it get away from them the second it was off the ground.

I learned a lot from this event, but for now suffice it to say that I have a new voice in my head after that training -- and it is still with me. It's part of what makes me a foodie, as much as going to La Cumbre and eating burritos made out of organ meats was as a kid.

Or was it the elaborate decisionmaking processes and the great dinners that followed Grateful Dead shows when we lived in the Bay Area? Or ...? How did you come to be a foodie? How does it affect your life?
-rk

Why be a Foodie?

My best friend Robyn works in the food industry and I (vanillagrrl, aka Rise) am a writer and a mother. As enthusiastic samplers of what the world has to offer, we both come to our interest in and passion for food from different places and will post about our own backgrounds soon.

But our primary interest in starting this blog is in learning about how you came to have a passion for ingredients, for sources, for dining out, for sustainability, for exploring the world through food, for learning as much as possible about the best ways to sustain ourselves today, or whatever brings you to call yourself a "foodie." We would like to hear how you became interested in food and eating.

For now, until we set this up with a proper message-board interface, send an email to us so we can add you to the list of blog authors and join in the discussion.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking:

• What sparked your interest in food?


• Are you more interested in food than most of the people around you?


• Do your standards for food preparation or dining differ from those of the people around you?


• What's the best meal you ever ate and why?

-rk