RSVP : A Cause You Could Really Sink Your Teeth Into

Besides weddings and funerals, this may be the only event where the concept of arriving stylishly late is completely disregarded. If you’re tardy, you may miss out on a slice of braised and barbecued young baby pig on charcoaled area of fresh and dried Indian red corn, courtesy of Lydia Shire of Biba in Boston. And no one wants to do that.

Veterans of Saturday night’s American Wine & Food Festival, now in its 13th year, know the drill: Get there on time (the event starts, unfashionably, at 6 p.m. on the Universal Studios back lot), never relinquish your wine glass (they tend to run out), and ignore tables bearing “reserved” signs--no one sits for long, so what’s a little chair poaching among friends?

With 25 celebrity chefs and about triple that number of wineries providing the grazing material, the festival is the ultimate feeding frenzy. For $175 a ticket, there are no limits on refills, and wily types can wheedle a bottle of Pahlmeyer for their table. The $350,000 raised will go to support Meals on Wheels of West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Malibu and Los Angeles. The sisters of St. Vincent’s Medical Center cook the 1,000 hot meals daily that are delivered to the homebound.

The longest line, not surprisingly, quickly formed at Wolfgang Puck/Barbara Lazaroff country, a small fortress containing eats from Spago West Hollywood, Spago Las Vegas, Chinois on Main and Granita. Through the Wolfgang Puck Charitable Foundation, Puck established the festival and still handpicks the participating chefs.

Not only that, he still puts on his apron and cooks. “Oh, I love it,” he said, carving into grilled squabs to be topped with huckleberry sauce. “The restaurants love to come, but it does get harder to sell tickets,” he admitted, even though the goal of 1,500 was reached. “I really believe the people who come get their money’s worth. It’s not like you get dried-out chicken.”

Actually, chicken was the one thing you really had to search for. Instead, there was venison grilled with soft corn pudding and port wine reduction sauce (dished out by Jonathan Waxman of Bryant Park Grill in New York); cod wrapped in grape leaves (from Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton of Campanile); smoked duck, cashew butter and hot pepper jelly sandwiches (created by Susan Spicer of Bayona in New Orleans); crispy risotto cakes with a ragout of corn, crab and apple smoked bacon (from Joachim Splichal of Patina and Pinot); luvoltini di pesce spado (translation: some kind of fish, served by Piero Selvaggio of Valentino, Primi and Posto), and so on.

In the say-what? culinary category, Anne Rosenzweig of Arcadia in New York doled out crispy grits tarts with country ham, fig chutney and a lemon-and-mint clabbered cream. Grits, Rosenzweig explained, are “the polenta of the 21st Century.”

If truth be told, nothing outdid the Jurassic-sized ribs coming off the grill at the joint-effort table of Houston’s Cafe Annie and Dallas’ Mansion on Turtle Creek. On the fire were 600 pounds of smoked longhorn ribs grilled in chicken wire cages, “the way they do it in Texas,” said the Mansion’s Dean Fearing. Each rib weighed about six pounds. “You can use it for a canoe paddle when you’re done,” Fearing advised a taker.

L.A. Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti proved to be a man of simple taste. His favorite was the lamb chops from Bradley Ogden’s Lark Creek Inn in Larkspur, Calif. “I don’t have an opportunity to go to restaurants a lot,” he said. “I’ve been pretty busy.”