Fall · Bootlegger's Ball
When country goes high-class.
Bourbon in the big city — Pappy Van Winkle, Thomas Handy, the vintage ryes — and a custom game menu from an LA chef. Costumes encouraged.
Most are annual. All are excessive.
Whatever you call it, the theme holds: three to five butchered pigs, red wine, and bourbon. We eat every morsel — head cheese to home-cured prosciutto — and make rolled spleen, lung sausage, sous-vide tenderloin, and Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian salami along the way. Old-school, Cajun-village-on-a-remote-bayou style. No one does it like we do.
In French, "the Two." In practice, two items. We pour 100-point bottles — Mouton-Rothschild to Harlan, d'Yquem to Cheval Blanc, Latour, Colgin, Margaux, Sine Qua Non — beside the finest beef in the country: Angus, Piedmontese, Murray-Grey, Charolais, Scottish Longhorn, grass-fed and grain-finished. The only rule — it has to taste like the best. Eight years running, and one of our favorite nights.
Bourbon in the big city — Pappy Van Winkle, Thomas Handy, the vintage ryes — and a custom game menu from an LA chef. Costumes encouraged.
A backcountry distiller's party named for the inimitable Popcorn Sutton. Grappa, corn whiskey, apple brandy, pear schnapps. So far, no blindness.
We're hunting a full-time home in LA or Pasadena — a place to gather and cook everything from molecular gastronomy to biscuits and gravy, cure the hams and salumi, dry-age meat and fish, ferment the mash, and leave the cookbooks out. And somewhere to put another one of James's smokers. When we find it, we'll post it.