Art of Dining: Ah, What Foods These Morsels Be

Someone must have complained about the calories. That’s because Joachim Splichal, coordinating chef for the Art of Dining IV, saw to it that portions were sized down considerably for the event this year.

No one seemed to mind a bit. The Art of Dining, in case you don’t know, is a benefit dinner for the Newport Harbor Art Museum held annually at the swank Four Seasons Hotel in Fashion Island.

It’s a chance to eat dishes cooked by several of the world’s best chefs at one sitting, and it remains the culinary event of the year in Orange County. A well-heeled crowd of 430, which paid $300 a ticket, took advantage Sunday evening. The event netted $200,000 (including donations and proceeds from an auction) for the museum.

The one catch is that everyone is forced to come in evening clothes. Goodness knows those things can feel tight after six or seven courses.

But this year that wasn’t a problem. Last year, the calorie count topped out at 3,970, and I didn’t eat for an entire day after the event. This year, I woke up with an appetite for breakfast.

Splichal has improved the quality of the food every year, and you may wonder how he does it. Simple. He just rounds up a few of his friends--all of whom, it seems, are famous chefs--and gets them to submit three or four dishes for consideration. Then he tells them which one he wants, and puts the menu together.

The richest course started things off, a terrine of duck liver with tiny asparagus topped with a port wine aspic, the creation of Jean Claude Fabre of Restaurant Leonce in France.

Dishes like these aren’t the only reason to come to this dinner. Eric Hansen, of the Robert Mondavi Food and Wine Center in Costa Mesa, matches wines with the dishes, in this case pairing it with a delightful 1989 Sauvignon blanc from Byron on the Central Coast. The Mondavi Center, incidentally, donates all the wines for the event.

The second course--a salad of smoked sturgeon, watercress and wild mushroom with a fine herb vinaigrette--came from returning genius Charlie Trotter, of the Chicago restaurant that bears his name. In my opinion it was the evening’s best. Michel Pieton’s able staff at the Four Seasons prepared more than 9,000 tiny vegetable balls to garnish the dish.

Chef David Burke of New York’s River Cafe brought the third course--a smoked prawn gazpacho--in enormous containers. The sturgeon salad and gazpacho, incidentally, were washed down by a surprisingly light 1986 Mondavi fume blanc.

Splichal himself prepared the next course, an ephemeral square of potato lasagna with wild mushrooms and a sauce of finely minced Italian parsley. This is the type of dish he serves at his Los Angeles restaurant, Patina; it’s intellectual cooking that makes him a favorite among his peers. A 1989 Vichon Chardonnay made the perfect complement.

At this point, emcee Michael Mondavi endeared himself, explaining why a pinot noir, of all things, would be served with the king salmon with warm leek and ossetra caviar--sacrilege, some might say. Mondavi simply explained that there are no rules for matching foods with wines, and that one should always drink what one likes best. Amen to that. Don Pintabona and Drew Nieporent of New York’s Tribeca Grill did the dish, incidentally.

The Four Seasons’ own Michel Pieton did the next course: wonderful partridge with truffle sauce. The last course was a minuscule triangle of lamb with goat cheese in phyllo dough, from Emeril Lagasse of Emeril’s in New Orleans, both accompanied by a heady, mature 1981 Mondavi Cabernet sauvignon reserve. These portions were truly tiny, barely two mouthfuls. That’s the way it should be.

Dessert was intelligently done as well, a mango strudel served steaming hot from the oven with grainy coconut ice cream, the pride of Joseph Viehhauser of Le Canard, Hamburg, Germany, and Marion Schweigart. It was amazing how well coordinated the service was. Not a single dish came to the table cold, remarkable when you consider that 400 people were being served. I don’t know where Splichal can take the dinner from here.