By Laura Medina
While the fashion season rests and recharges as designers panicky preps for September's New York Fashion Week, the so-called doldrum months are being dotted by multiple food festivals and fetes feeding a subset of the super-stylish.
Believe it or not, not all fashionistas and stylistas are anoxeric club kids or starving starlets. Those who support the luxury business-good times, bad times (God Bless their hearts)-are on a constant prowl for anything of style and good taste. Plus, it doesn't hurt that the courses are portion-controlled friendly.
Literally fueling on low-calorie, high-protein and portion-controlled tapas and nibbles then refreshing on antioxidant/organic/fruit cocktails for next month's "fashion marathon," the super-stylish sample of what is best dishes from the best restaurants at Angeleno Magazine's Restaurant Awards.
Less stuffy awards show, more roaming, grazing, and swanning, the established-in-the know enjoyed the fine sea breezes, the well-tempered sunshine, and the spacious front yard of the Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows. It's Santa Monica's answer to the Beverly Hills Hotel.
The Fairmont's own Chef Ray Garcia of Fig Restaurant served a Cuban Pig Roast, the whole hog and all.
The fine, hot gentlemen of speakeasy bar-cum-olde school barbershop, Culver City's Blind Barber, served up what women are always searching for, a refreshing Strawberry Fields Cocktail, that women quaffed with abandonment. Blind Barber proves it is a prime spot where the men primp for the ladies.
There had been numerous upcoming restaurants posting booths at this food festival but the ones with the longest-line or those that have run-out of food, proved who are winners.
"New World" cuisine for the new 21st-century. Peruvian cuisine is coming into its own, standing on its own feet, and gaining respect.
Beverly Hills' Picca Peru (picca is Peruvian for "nibbles") had jaded tongues queuing for a new type of BBQ, seabass roasted on a skewer, drenched in rocoto leche de tigre and choclo, sprinkled with fried sweet potato noodles.
New World ingredients done Olde World Style.
Another run-away hit was a classic done hip, Plan Check Kitchen's Chef Ernesto Uchimura's Smokey Buttermilk Fried Chicken. With hints of smoke and spices, drooling foodies were biting in crunchy and juicy chicken breasts dressed in sweet potato puree. It's the food version of Southners reinventing themselves hip in the LA. It was the only booth that run out of food...now, that's something.
Of course, liqour sponsors sprinkle the food fest landspace or the grounds, but Jeff Laub & Gents, of Blind Barber, had women sipping Strawberry Fields cocktails out of their hands.
Coolhaus was a surprise shocker, pushing the envelope of what it means to be an ice cream.
Okay, bacon is the new dessert. The bacon bits are meat's answer to butter toffee bits in Coolhaus' Bacon Bourbon Vanilla Ice Cream. It's the one on the right.
The Fried Chicken n' Waffle Ice Cream was testing people's taste buds. Fried Batter Crumbs in a maple syrup ribbon of vanilla ice cream, on the left, was pushing the boundaries.
Dispelling the notion that foodies are fatties and not fashionable, look at these Cocktail Chic hotties posing next to the Audis. At these upscale foodie events, resort chic set the standard.
Angeleno Magazine's Restaurant Awards is not the only food fest nor is it the end all and be all of LA's Food Season.
It is part of a series of super-chic food feasts during late Summer. Angeleno Magazine's Restaurant Awards will team up with Theory, linking the passage from Food Season to Fashion Season.
It came after the prelude dinner for the LuckyRice Asian Food Festival which will hit Culver City full-throttle at Helms Bakery on August 4th, which will lead up to the biggest foodie fest of them all, LA's Food & Wine Festival, a three-days feast highlighting the City of Angels' numerous neighborhood restaurants and cuisine.
Angeleno Magazine's Restaurant Awards was just a nibble for the premiere of LuckyRice Asian Food Festival and LA Food Festival.
We are in the heat of the Foodie Season.
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