I was fortunate to attend a Food and Wine Festival recently at the prestigious St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort in Dana Point. It was sponsored by Buick and Food and Wine magazine. I arrived at the hotel on a Saturday afternoon and was led to the registration table. On the itinerary were two guest chefs, a test drive, a wine tasting, and for the finale, Chef Ming Tsai would be cooking a couple of dishes.

One of the guest chefs was the owner/chef of the two-Michelin starred Melisse Restaurant in Santa Monica, Josiah Citrin. He made a Hokkaido Scallop dish and went through the steps on the preparation and the different ingredients called for. During the cooking, he talked about how he started out as a chef and how he got to where he is today in the California food scene in LA.

The other guest chef was Ben Roche from Moto restaurant in Chicago. He’s the pastry chef there and the cuisine centered more on gastronomical cooking. He showed how to do a walnut flavored ice cream using liquid nitrogen and his other dish involved constructing his version of s’mores using some unique ingredients.

Right before the Ming Tsai cooking demonstration, there was a short wine pairing lesson by sommelier Michael Green. We had a white chardonnay wine and a red cabernet. We learned about the 5 S’s to wine tasting – See, Swirl, Sniff, Sip, Savor, and Swallow. We tried the white wine first and noticed it had a bit of a bitter aftertaste. We then took a bite of a lemon slice and drank the white wine again and now the bitterness was completely gone. It was much better and tasted fruity now. For the red wine, again, the first tasting had a bit of sour taste as a result of the tannins in the red wine. With this, we paired it with a Formaggio cheese and the second time around, the wine lost its sour taste.

Finally, Ming Tsai comes out and made two dishes – Chicken Chow Mein and Sweet and Sour Mango Pork. Ming was pretty cool telling some interesting stories about his experience on the Iron Chef show. I got to taste the first dish of Chicken Chow Mein. It was decent and had a good flavor. At the end, everyone got an autographed book of his cookbook Simply Ming which made me pretty happy.

So next time your boss offers you free tickets to some seemingly random event, take them! You never know the cool things you might learn or the free food and wine you might get!