A Flavorful ‘Fete X Five’

Disembodied, white-gloved hands played a silvery orchestra of tubas, trumpets and trombones on the magical backdrop created for the stage at Saturday’s “Come Dime With Us,” the fifth edition of the annual “Fete X Five” benefit for the March of Dimes.

More symbolism than may have been intended attached itself to the ghostly, Art Deco-style curtain, a bit of decor meant primarily to toast the talents of the Bill Green Orchestra and to prompt the 300 guests to trot out to the dance floor in the Champagne Ballroom at the Sheraton Harbor Island.

But all those hands--and there were dozens of them--also reminded of the unseen hands, many attached to famous chefs, that sliced, diced, minced, basted, chopped and kneaded behind the scenes at one of the city’s two leading, annual food-oriented galas. (The other, “Celebrities Cook for the UC San Diego Cancer Center,” is given in the spring.)

Even more than that, they brought to mind the legions of hands that, in the days when tens of thousands of American women solicited funds door-to-door in the Mother’s March of Dimes, held out the canisters to attract coins to develop a polio vaccine.

One of the first men to enter the reception room turned to his wife and asked, “Rubber chicken again tonight?” She responded with some vigor (in a room suffused with such heady aromas, a denial hardly seemed necessary) that chicken, rubber or otherwise, had been banished from the premises for the evening and that he could browse the hors d’oeuvres tables in complete safety.

“Tonight we eat, right through the evening,” chairwoman Marla Blom said. “This is a food fest pure and simple, and my advice to anyone who has doubts about getting through the menu is to just eat now and worry about it later.” Blom added that she expected proceeds of $120,000 to be raised by ticket sales, the raffle of a trip to Australia and a brief live auction.

Although “Fete X Five” is meant to be translated as “Feast Times Five” and denotes the presence of five top chefs drawn from around the country, the chef roster expanded by one this year to add even more variety to what is essentially a movable feast in two acts.

The first of these, the hors d’oeuvres reception, took place in an anteroom decorated with a “Dime Tree,” an enormous arrangement of white flowers and silvered branches from which hung glitter-coated enlargements of the Liberty dime, which bears the visage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most famous polio victim of the age in which the March of Dimes was born.

White and silver balloons littered the floor of this room, and forks clattered against china plates each time one of them popped under the pressure of a stiletto heel. The occasional explosions did nothing to halt the flow of guests from one chef’s station to the next.

The most popular destination may have been the table at which Ariane Daguin, the young Frenchwoman who has established the United States’ first authentic foie gras production company in Jersey City, handed out plates of the silky duck liver on plates monogrammed, in prune sauce, with a swirling “D.”

Master pastry chef Jim Dodge, who for 10 years ruled the ovens at San Francisco’s noted Stanford Court hotel, offered buttery twists of puff pastry studded with hazelnuts and cracked pepper. Indigenous American cooking was represented by Emeril Lagasse of Emeril’s in New Orleans, who offered his version of that city’s barbecued shrimp, which disdains barbecue sauce but is not shy about spicing.

Guests who maintained their appetites by dashing around the room like kids in a candy store also found room for the lobster ravioli prepared by Vincent Guerithault, owner of a restaurant of the same name in Phoenix, and the corn and smoked salmon cakes made by Georges Perrier of Philadelphia’s widely respected Le Bec Fin. For the dinner service, the group was joined by Michel Blanchet, long the chef at the recently closed L’Ermitage in Los Angeles, which for years attracted such an exclusive clientele that it maintained an unlisted telephone number.

Cookbook author and former chef Pierre Franey assembled the company of chefs, as he does for similar March of Dimes benefits given around the country.

“Every time I ask chefs if they want to come cook in San Diego, they all say, ‘OK, we’ll be there!’ And most of them want to come back. Everybody likes this town.”

The transition to the ballroom was followed by more food; each of the chefs, with the exception of Daguin, contributed a dish to the five-course meal, which included Blanchet’s halibut with fried ginger and fat slices of the rich chocolate almond meringue cake baked by Dodge. The dancing between courses sometimes seemed to take on the aspect of an aerobic exercise intended to make room for the following dishes.

The ballroom decor followed the reception theme and included smaller “Dime trees” on each table, along with aprons tied to the chair backs and meant to be taken home as favors; each had been autographed by Franey and the chefs.

Many guests discovered early on that the silvery fabric stretched across the service plates could be removed and improvised into a cap, so that many platinum blondes suddenly appeared on the dance floor.

Actress and former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley and her husband, television personality Gary Collins, attended in their roles of official “good-will ambassadors” for the March of Dimes. They explained the current program of the March of Dimes, which, long after the polio battle has been won, focuses on its “campaign for healthier babies.” The reduction of low birth weights and infant mortality rates are primary goals.

March of Dimes funds are distributed locally among a large number of research institutions, including the Salk Institute, Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, the Whittier Institute and San Diego State University.

“This last decade brought challenges to the unborn we never dreamed of, like AIDS and designer drugs and crack cocaine,” Collins said. “We have to redouble our education efforts to save these little babies.”

Auctioneer Ron Reina coaxed about $5,000 from the audience for the four items, which included dinners in private homes and the use of a private sky box at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium for a Padres game. “You too can enjoy a feast of hot dogs and beans,” he intoned teasingly to a crowd sated with gumbo and veal; the item brought $2,100.

Blom’s committee was headed by co-chairs Martha Culbertson, Audrey Geisel (who did not attend) and Dixie Unruh, and included local March of Dimes President Frank Laughton, Suzanne Moore, Maureen Clancy, Liz Lovelace, Shirley Millard, David Lane, Melanie Cohrs, Marilynn Boesky, Michael Yeatts and G. Steve Hamm.

Among the guests were Cheryl and Ron Kendrick, Lee and Frank Goldberg, Luba Johnston, Dolly and Jim Poet, Evelyn Truitt, Pat and Dan Pegg, Kathy and Dick Daniels, Mary and Irby Cobb, Nina and Robert Doede, Jennifer Mitchell, Darlene and Donald Shiley, Molly and Chuck Brazell, Lael and Jay Kovtun, Teddie and Jules Pincus, Jill and Jeff Sugar, Martha and George Gafford, Celia Ballesteros and Bea and Bob Epsten.