With over 200 events at the Beard House each year, our calendar is overflowing with top toques and rising stars from restaurant kitchens across the country. Each dinner at the Beard House is a unique culinary experience, but every so often a specific event will have our stomachs rumbling simply by scanning the menu. Read on to learn which event has piqued our palates lately.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Lowcountry Meets New Orleans
After stints at acclaimed Big Easy spots, Ryan Hughes opened Purloo as an exhibition kitchen and restaurant in the city’s Southern Food and Beverage Museum. Known for his rotating menus highlighting regional classics, Hughes will give Beard House diners a fried, pickled, and flavor-packed glimpse into his love affair with the Lowcountry.
"Purloo represents an exciting new wave of New Orleans restaurants that are highly influenced by the rich culture of new Orleans traditions but bring a hybrid and thoroughly unique approach to the food," explained JBF director of house programming Izabela Wojcik. "Ryan Hughes was a young Ohio cook who cut his teeth on the finest French restaurant in the Midwest, spent impressionable early professional years in Charleston, and then landed in some of the best Crescent City stalwarts as finishing school (like Brennan’s, Emeril’s, Delmonico’s, and Café Degas)—and you can see all those influences in his fabulous Lowcountry Meets New Orleans menu."
Packed with some time-honored dishes like Cajun boiled peanuts, pimento cheese with benne seed crackers, and cornmeal-fried pickles, the tantalizing menu also introduces innovative spins on traditional ingredients: turnips with green goddess dressing and redneck caviar, curried goat with cardamom-infused grits, and fried meyer lemon hand pies with coconut gelato and salted caramel. "The menu is a celebration of recipes from different pockets of the community," says Wojcik. "Each course represents an evocative stop, from an oyster dish from the Delta, to the dessert titled 'Flora-bama' which is a spot-on manifestation of the Florida/Alabama border culture, to classic front-porch snacks —and what Yankee doesn’t yearn for a southern porch?!" Check out the full menu and book your seat.
For all upcoming Beard House dinners, check out our events calendar.
