REEL TASTY Rear Window

Last night we pulled off another successful collaboration with our friends over at Gastronauts. You may remember our last creole/cajun collaboration. This year, the Forking Tasty crew along with my kitchen collaborators from Whisk & Ladle, went in a totally different direction than last time. About four months ago over a few oysters and meticulously crafted cocktails at a popular Williamsburg Brooklyn haunt, we brainstormed an 11 course, plated, all bird menu. Below is the final draft of that session. Stay tuned for a post with a breakdown and picture of each delectable dish.

From gladiators to Vespas. Here’s the skinny on the fat. Our next dinner is a pure classic. How could you go wrong with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Italy circa 1953? Rhetorical. You can’t! My grandfather is from a small town just south of Rome named Fondi. No visit to Rome is complete without a stop at the old citrus farm they had down there. Expect a little influence from this little town in the menu. Hopefully the food and the film will inspire you to take your own Roman Holiday soon. There is no line at the vatican in early December. Shhhh.ut and enjoy yourselves with us this summer. See you on the deck.

Saturday, August 24th at 7pm. We’re going back…to the future. We realize that doesn’t make much sense but we had to open with it. We love everything about this dinner including the Huey Lewis music we’ll get to use at various points in the evening. Ant and I love this movie. In fact the entire trilogy was in heavy rotation until the mid 90’s at the Anello’s house. Besides the amazing story, epic-joke-per-second, MJF prime on screen magic, we’ll draw from the entire trilogy to craft this menu. Expect some 1985 dishes and some 1955 throwbacks but we’re thinkin’ we might blast you into 2015 and dip you even further back to the wild west of 1885. What that means exactly…we have not completely figured out but we’re working on it.

Expect a menu of enchantment under the sea, the word that makes Marty lose his cool and some inside jokes translated to menu items. We’ll augment that with some of our favorite dishes from the decades that the movie is set in. 2015 will be tough, but we’ll try. Ant and I hope you can join us for what will be a multi-decade adventure not only into our childhood but into the childhood of our predecessors.

Saturday, July 17th at 7:30pm. Being ex-Advertising people ourselves, this film seemed very appropriate. Ohh, but we are not killers. As Cary Grant, a hapless New York advertising executive, gets mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, he is chased across the country while he looks for a way to survive. We will follow him from New York to Chicago, across the great plains and finally to South Dakota with a culinary treat from each location. Have you ever heard of an Indian Taco? What do they grow most in Indiana? What is Chicago’s most underground famous food? These questions and more will be answered soon enough.