Past: Farmacy Farm-to-Fork Benefit Dinner

Throughout the pandemic, Rex Hale, one of the most passionate and talented locavore chefs in the metro area, has kept busy feeding those in need and organizing event dinners to the same end. In March, he collected and shared more than 60,000 pounds of food at 50-plus locations across the region. In August, he enlisted a coterie of female chefs for a “Ladies of the Canyon” dinner at Bohlen Family Farms.

This Friday, November 20, four chefs with St. Louis roots will join the Green family at Spanish Street Farmacy, their farm-to-table café, market, soda fountain, and microcreamery in Cape Girardeau. Together, the chefs will create a dinner “to celebrate the commitment of chefs to the farms, to community, to all of us,” as Hale puts it.

Gian Nicola Colucci, former executive chef at the Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis, will present the first course, Italian and Spanish tapas. After a recent stint at Café Boulud, Daniel Boulud’s restaurant at the the Four Seasons Toronto, Colucci recently moved to Cape Girardeau to work with Gabriel Ruggieri at upscale Italian restaurant Gabriel’s Food & Wine. His duties will include further refining the restaurant, market, catering operation, and organizing and conducting cooking classes. Ruggieri wants to create a destination location in southeast Missouri.

The second course—smoked Missouri rainbow trout with sweet sorghum herb pesto and creme fraiche and chile—will be prepared by Hale, a globe-trotting chef and alum of Three Sixty, Boundary, Basso, and Bakers & Hale.

Andrew Cisneros, a chef of Peruvian heritage who worked at Privado, Elaia, Nixta, and the Four Seasons (where he was chef de partie under Colucci), will offer a spit-roasted local chicken with Peruvian spices and Korean condiments.

Ryan Maher, a well-respected local utility chef and master forager, gets main course honors with a Braised Boneless Beef Short Rib with Wild Garlic Mustard Polenta Roasted Roots and Foraged Mushroom Stew.

For dessert, the Greens will prepare crisp with paw paw cardamom ice cream flambeed with sweet sorghum whiskey.

Local fine art painter Billyo O’Donnell will be at the event, painting a landscape and auctioning off the piece. Proceeds from the event (and the painting) will be donated to Custom Foodscaping, a local outfit that designs and plants “edible landscaping” (read: perrennial gardens) for those in need in the St. Louis area and beyond. The company’s tagline: "Have your landscape and eat it too."

Hale says the restaurant has many nooks and crannies, so social distancing should not be a problem for the 100 guests expected to attend. Tickets are $80 per person and available at Eventbrite.

George Mahe, St. Louis Magazine