Crop Roots

Gibson Guitars and The Rock Hall Museum created a projected called Cleveland Rocks. They selected 25 artists to design a guitar that will be displayed at the Rock Hall and auctioned off at a gala dinner fundraiser on December 3rd. Interestingly, I was selected as one of the 25 artists, and recieved a brand new Les Paul to rip apart and re-design. Of course I leaned to the food inspiration and created what I named CROP ROOTS. Took a month to finish it, striping, hand carving and laminating. The final work is pretty cool, and Donnie used it at our last Cream of The Crop night and it sounded KILLA!

Now I want it back! May have to bid high at the gala.

Summer Time Gone again

Labor day has passed, summer is figuratively done and manged to have 2 full days off The 4th of July and yes…. Labor Day. For everyone who fantasies about being in this business, find a new fantasy unless you want to never enjoy summer again. Now don’t get me wrong, being as busy as we were all summer is a great thing and we continue to raise the bar with every dish, BUT…… No beach, no golf, no nuthin! The biggest bonus has been great local produce and the Cleveland weather has been superb, GO GLOBAL WARMING!!

Looking forward to a great indian summer!

Rockin BBQ

It has taken a week to catch a breath after the Cleveland Food Rocks BBQ, but here it is!
Sun all day, 400+ people, 26 top Cleveland Chefs doin KILLA food,4 bands all featuring restaurant staff and BOOTSY COLLINS Jammin with our Cream of the Crop Band! Gibson Guitars was a key sponsor and hooked us up with the tour bus for the weekend and donated a Cherry SG custom guitar for the raffle, which raised over 2K !!!
Everyone who attended said it was the best food event they ever experinced and I will have to agree! Tons of work but it was a smash and we did what we set out to do. Have a great event, bring the Chef community together, rasie $$ for the ongoing website, cover costs of the event and start a charitable platform with proceeds. Already thinking about next year!

Feed My Team #2

The Browns new running back, Noah Herron has been cooking on the last 2 Sunday suppers. Week one featured his Shrimp Etoufee, this week we did Grilled Hanger steak,Smoked Cheddar Mashed and his Killa Banana Pudding! The guy can cook and he hung on the line for every ticket! Both weeks we had a bunch of his team mates show thier support and they loved the food!

The politics of food

Kind of random, but the Mayor, Frank Jackson finally made it into Crop last week on a walking tour of the Warehouse district. His staff are here every Thursday PM for Get Cropped so I was surprised it has taken so long. Seemed interested in what were doing with Local Crop and Cleveland Food Rocks and we sent him packing with our famous Double Double Lamb Sliders

Local Crop growing

I love it when a plan comes together! After exactly one year of working out the Local Crop business model and tweaking the Local Crop Cleveland model with SYSCO, we are rolling out to our next market!! Local Crop Central Ohio will be opening up with SYSCO Columbus in one month. What is really great is that we will be adding all the current suppliers to the new market and we will be able to add the new suppliers from central Ohio to the Cleveland market as well. This is huge for the farmers as we just doubled thier market potential. Very amped about adding killer stuff like Jeni’s Ice Cream as we will be able to get it in Cleveland as well. If all goes well we will be adding a few more new locations before the summers end. Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philly are looking good.

Walk of Life

After a jammin Friday night Cream Of the Crop headed to Middleburg Hts. to play for the Walk of Life annual fundraiser. Dragging a bit but we managed to rally and play an amped up 1 hour set. Neehar just posted one of the tunes on the Cleveland Food Rocks site and it sounds PDG. We we able to plug into my digital recorder for the first time straight off the mixing board and the results were just dandy!
Getting back for service that night for a full Saturday house was a bit challenging but the adreneline kicked in after all.
Good tune, good times good food!

Fifty and Really Full

To the amazement of many, I have arrived at the Half Century mark!
AT18, 30 seemed impossible.  At 30, 50 was a distant concept. Boy how things and perspectives change!
So yes I turned the Big Five -O this past May 7th along with my son Steve who turned 24. A bonus of your son having the same birthday is that it usually defelects attention from your own birthday. However with me turning 50, there was no avoiding extra attention. OK, so I agree I have run hard for the better part of my 50 years and can be considered a “higher mileage car” for my age. This business does come with a brutal work load and the propensity for playing hard, and with work weeks of 60-80 hours per, the math equates to being like 90 years old!!
Regardless, I feel great, it is just a number after all!
So to “celebrate” turning 50, Jackie arranged 3 days in NYC with Stevie and Kirsten for 3 days of food and drink.
Day one started with lunch at Gramercy Tavern. Always one of my favs, it did not dissapoint. Simple great ingredients, rustic flavor and love. For dinner we started at The Spotted Pig for apps and cocktails, Sheeps Milk Gnudi with Brown Butter and Sage ROCKED. we then headed over to PDT, where you need a reservation and you enter thru the phone booth inside of Crif Dogs the trendy hod dog outpost. Serious cocktail alchemy at PDT and a “must do” for your next NYC visit.

Wednesday’s lunch included Momofuko Noodle for some pork buns, chicken buns, Noodle bowl and Peanut and Stout soft serve. Second stop for lunch was Porchetta for thier famous sandwich and potatoes with burnt ends. Life is good! Dinner at Blue Hill with Chef Dan barber cooking a 50th Bday dinner menu was specatacular and as always Dan is Dan!! Braised Lamb belly stole the show out of the 11 excellent  courses.

Thursday featured Eggs Benedict on the Terrace at Gramercy Park Hotel, which I must add is a great hotel, we all loved it even if a Makers Mark on the Rocks is 18.00$. Lunch was pizza at Tortonnos , many agree it is one of NYC best pies, and it did not disapoint at all.

The grand finale was dinner at Per Se. Thomas and crew assembeld a 17 course birthday menu that was over the top to say the least. I am always impressed with the food, but just like the French Laundry, the complete package is waht it is all about. Seamless flow, perfect service, detail, detail, detail!! Every thing was perfect. I will post a copy of the exact menu on the Crop website as soon as I get the chance.

So mission accomplished… I hit the 50 mark and managed to celebrate with what matters most. Great food, great drink, great people and great family!

50 and full!

The B-Day boys and Kirsten

Cleveland Food really rocks

Many of you have heard my angle of the correlation between food and music, and all it took to come up with the idea for Clevelandfoodrocks.com, was after a late night of jamming with Cream of the Crop and standing around with a bunch of fellow chefs all proclaiming that Cleveland rocks! A few key strokes later, I owned the domain names for Cleveland food, chefs and restaurants rock. So what next? start a free website that promotes our city and the robust food and music scene.

A few calls to get a team together and we had ADCOM/OPTIEM agree to build the website, The Scene, WKYC, Cool Cleveland, Great Lakes Publishing and the Rock Hall all on board to sponsor at no cost!! Get a bunch of restaurants to pony up and have live music and some cool food and drink ideas and start the promo during the Rock Inductions week and the plan was on a ROLL.

We ended up with a KILLER website (Kudos to ADCOM!!!!), 18 restaurants who all featured some great live music and everyone created fun rock inspired goodies for the menu. We got great TV, Radio and print coverage all highlighting Cleveland’s roll up the sleeves attitude.

So now we need to keep the fires burning! Over the next 2 week we will be designing an ongoing promo schedule and make sure all Cleveland restaurants know that they can join in on the website activity as well as start getting their own house bands together for the future Battle of the Restaurant Bands contest this summer. In this challenging economy, we need to add value to the guest who frequent and support our establishments. Discounts don’t work! We need to raise the bar for the customer to insure that they can find not only great food and service in Cleveland but also a commitment to enhancing the total experience.

Thanks to everyone who made this happen!

Steve

Not so Clinical

We have been working on a project with the Cleveland Clinic, and 2 weeeks ago we did a dinner on the roof top in honor of Colin Cowie the event planner to the stars. Rick Tramonto and I did the food and Gale Gands dessert was prepared by Olena our Crop pastry chef as Gale couldnt make it in for the dinner. Rick did the first 2 courses, a very cool beet salad and then Cinnamon dusted tuna. I did a seared Monchong with an infused miso deal and then Lamb Loin with Black Figs. The dinner really was killer on all fronts .