THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 17, 1996 TAG: 9604160033
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F5 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: A La Carte
SOURCE: Donna Reiss
LENGTH: Short : 44 lines
IT WAS A chefs' reunion, as Keith Korn of Chicago's Gordon restaurant and Todd Jurich of Norfolk's Bistro! joined Sam McGann of Ocean Boulevard last month in McGann's Kitty Hawk restaurant.
Celebrating the homecoming of Korn, a local cook who went to the big city and became a celebrity chef, this benefit for the James Beard Foundation featured an incredible array of food and wine and a room full of well-wishers from regional restaurants.
Rick Maggard, owner of Cafe Society in Virginia Beach, and wife Madelyn, a baker and bartender, were there to honor Maggard's proteges. Korn, Jurich and McGann - along with Willie Moats, now of Virginia Beach's Timbuktu - cooked in Maggard's Crawdad's on the Virginia Beach Oceanfront in the 1980s.
Ronnie Brown of Cafe Society, Meredith Nicolls and Robert Burger of the Kitchen at Powhatan Plantation in Williamsburg, and Gary Black of Coyote Cafe in Virginia Beach were among the culinary crowd oohing and aahing over an exquisite second course of tuna tartare topped with cucumber, mango and radish and surrounded by a pool of avocado sauce plus a silken film of saffron sauce.
The small touches that make a big difference were everywhere. One plump oyster on the half shell perched not on a boring bed of rock salt but on an edible swirl of Japanese seaweed. A single jumbo sea scallop topped with foie gras and garnished with chestnuts, Surry ham and blackerry sauce was so lush that some of us were ready to retire - until ``one of Keith's really good desserts,'' according to the menu description, arrived. In a flaky pastry basket were chocolate-coffee sorbet, caramel bananas and chocolate sauce in an extravagant variant of banana cream pie meets fudge sundae meets bananas Foster without the fire. The chefs selected wines to match the courses, and the staff passed cigars with the port.
Maggard, whose kitchens have nurtured several stellar chefs, plans to bring Korn back to Virginia Beach for a guest appearance this summer. by CNB