CREATE Boston launched five years ago, just around when Fort Point, New England’s oldest and largest artist community, started to lose its identity to redevelopment. “With no city plan to assist the now-displaced artists, we wanted to find a way to foster them back into the community,” says CREATE’s founding chef, Louis DiBiccari.

DiBiccari and his partners decided to pair artists with chefs, creating an installation for a one-day event designed to bridge the gap between visual and culinary arts in the city of Boston. Now in its sixth year, CREATE remains a celebration of art, food, drink, and music, but it has also broadened since its inception. The event now pairs bartenders with artists and chefs, and the organizers have added DJs, live music performances, merchants, live installations, performance art, and more.

“It’s becoming more of a festival of sorts,” says DiBiccari. But while New England has lots of art events, food events, and plenty of music festivals, CREATE is unique because it establishes a level playing field for art, food, music, and drink. CREATE returns on April 7th as a part of BESPOKE, a weekend-long celebration of food, art, culture, and ideas in Boston’s historic SoWa neighborhood.

CREATE Boston, 2016 | Photo courtesy Natasha Moustache Photography

Boston is now years into the redevelopment of Fort Point, and, thankfully, more and more restaurants are trying to support local artisans—whether it’s through purchasing their pottery, art or photography, or by using local products specifically in the kitchen. “We’re seeing lots of chefs moving toward using small local producers for ingredients,” DiBiccari says. “That all falls under the umbrella of CREATE.”

DiBiccari led the way in this mindset with his restaurant Tavern Road, which he opened in 2013 with his brother Michael. Now, most of what you see at Tavern Road has a tie back to CREATE. “I don’t know what Tavern Road would look like without CREATE,” says DiBiccari. “Lots of our space is characterized by our relationships with CREATE artists.”CREATE’s long-term mission is to develop more opportunities for Boston’s artists. “I’m a lucky guy,” says DiBiccari. “I discovered I loved to cook and there were plenty of opportunities to make it my career. Artists need more opportunities here.”

Tickets to CREATE can be purchased here.

Chef Louis DiBiccari – founding chef, CREATE Boston
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All images courtesy of Natasha Moustache Photography

The post CREATE-ing a Better Boston appeared first on Take Magazine.

“We focus on one thing, and always keep our eye on it: people who like stuff that tastes good.” It’s such a simple statement from Drink Craft Beer co-founder Jeff Wharton, but it sums up the company’s ethos perfectly. Fort Point tech workers and family guys Wharton and Devon Regan started the company in 2006, “as a blog to provide more accessible access to craft beer culture and knowledge for the folks that didn’t want to use a forum. It’s more for the craft beer curious, versus the uber enthusiast.”

Boston Beer & Cheese Fest, 2016 | Image courtesy Drink Craft Beer

The website created was, and still is, an active and informative place to find some of their favorite beer-of-the-month clubs, beer-centric savory recipes, homebrewing tips, and local craft beer news and events. The word ‘pairings’ is used in many ways: with beer, with friends, with food, and with a great vibe. “Sharing great beer and great food with great friends, you can’t help but have a good time,” says Wharton. “But we’ve always wanted to make the point that friends and being social should come ahead of the beer and food.” It was the focus on the social aspect that led them to create their first pairing event with Taza Chocolate in 2008;  it was, to put it mildly, wildly successful. “We expected 50 people to show up,” explains Wharton, “and 300 waited in line for a couple samples of beer and chocolate paired together.”

Fast-forward a few years, and the two now produce three popular beer festivals in Boston annually: Boston Beer & Cheese, Boston Beer & BBQ, and Boston Beer & Sweets. Coming up on March 10th & 11th at the Cyclorama in the South End (you may be able to snag one of a handful of tickets still available, if you’re lucky) is the Cheese companion event: over 80 New England craft beers and ciders from 25 different breweries, with unlimited samples of cheese from 10 New England creameries. Savor your oatmeal stout with a sharp Vermont cheddar, try a hopped-up IPA to cut through gorgonzola, pair a yeasty Hefeweizen with some soft, tangy goat cheese, or customize your own combo—no food rules apply. You’ll even come across some non-cheesy nibbles while you’re there to test out as well. The self-explanatory Boston Beer & BBQ is coming up in July, and the Boston Beer & Sweets Fest, featuring fancy truffles, specialty donuts, cookies, and ice cream for beer floats, will be scheduled for later this year.

Boston Beer & Cheese Fest, 2016 | Image courtesy Drink Craft Bee

It’s an excellent environment for tasty food and drink, knowledgeable vendors, and a fun crowd. “We saw a lot of the hyper-enthusiasts creating spaces on these internet forums that turned off casual beer drinkers,” states Wharton. “We wanted to be the opposite. So, from the beginning, we focused on tasting experiences, recommendations versus reviews, locality, and food. Brewers tell us they see increased sales and traffic to their tap rooms after our events, and people tell them they discovered their beer at a Drink Craft Beer event. This all means so much to us, because the goal has always been to help people learn about great food and drink in their backyards, get them out socially to learn this stuff, and help to bolster local companies. And it seems like it’s working.”

Drink Craft Beer – co-founders, Devon Regan and Jeff Wharton
Boston, Massachusetts
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Top image Boston Beer & Cheese Fest, 2016 | Image courtesy Drink Craft Beer

The post Quite a Pair: Boston Beer & Cheese Fest appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our September 2015 print issue.

Rabelais is the finest culinary destination in Maine where there’s nothing to eat. This bookshop in Biddeford stocks the most up-to-date, most niche books on food and drink, as well as historical acquisitions that serve the cravings of scholars and food trends.

“Fermentation got hot, so I went looking for anything I could find on fermentation,” says co-owner Don Lindgren. “Before that, it was charcuterie.”

In addition to unusual books, Rabelais boasts collections of ephemera such as “Swinalia”—postcards and memorabilia of the late 1800s that feature pigs. The collection’s strength is in its mechanical postcards, many with cryptic political messages, including one depicting a sow continually issuing (via a paper wheel on a grommet) human babies into a Prussian’s helmet.

Don Lindgren | Photo by Cara Slifka

“The pig is giving birth to German imperialists or something,” says Lindgren, who, except for a stint in the ’90s as an A&R man for Sony Music International, has been in the book business for decades. He owns Rabelais with his wife, photo editor-turned-pastry-chef Samantha Hoyt Lindgren.

Less recognizably edible creatures populate The Market Assistant, an index to bygone food markets of the Northeast and what was in season in the mid-nineteenth century: terrapin, black bear, fancy rabbit, brilliant chub sucker, domesticated swan.

It’s part of a collection of early American cookbooks that looms over Rabelais’s space in a converted textile mill. There is ample evidence of the specialized texts that have characterized food publishing in the United States: recipes for industrious frontier orphans, recipes from the birth of southern cuisine, recipes to accommodate dietary restrictions. “All of the reform movements are represented in [American] cookbooks,” says Lindgren. “You look at French cookbooks [of that era], you don’t get any of this stuff.”

Women’s suffrage has its cuisine, and so do gold diggers—“social mobility” cookbooks or, as Lindgren puts it, “so, you’ve married a banker.” The intended audience of Quick Cooking: A Book of Culinary Heresies for the Busy Wives and Mothers of the Land may have been a less aspirational bride, intent on frying up some buckwheat cakes in a hurry, but its introduction reassures us that the purchaser could be fancy: “Even where there is a servant or two in the household the book should be a welcome acquisition, for time saved to the servant is help gained to the mistress.” If she ever needs to know when swan is in season, Rabelais has a book for that.

Rabelais Books – bookstore
Biddeford, Maine
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All photography by Cara Slifka

The post Culinary Heresies appeared first on Take Magazine.

The idea works so well it almost seems obvious: a chef-centric butchershop, Prohibition-era bar, and European-style delicatessen. But for co-owners Crystal Maderia and Jules Guillemette, it was five years in the making.

BEAU is brand new on the Vermont eatery scene, and already making a splash—quite literally—with an ever-changing menu of unusually sourced cocktails being poured behind the bar.

“The decision of adding a bar to the butcher shop was to give our clientele a space to imbibe while discussing a good cut of meat,” explains Maderia.

Intended to start a conversation about the mission and purpose of BEAU, which is to relish the historical, the bar features classically vintage-inspired cocktails such as the “Heavy Weather”—a bourbon, rye, hazelnut, and egg cream combo named after the P.G. Wodehouse novel. Here at BEAU, it’s never too early for a cocktail.

Image courtesy Beau

“Because we have a bar in the butcher shop,” said Maderia, “it makes us think of a time when bars were hidden in obscure places.”

Prior to opening BEAU, Maderia was (and still remains) the chef-owner of Kismet, a Slow Food Certified farm-to-table restaurant in Montpelier. She is also the author of The New Seaweed Cookbook, and her recipes have been featured in Bon Appetit and The New York Times.

“Owning a business is a lot of work, my day never really ends,” says Maderia. “I am extremely fortunate that I have an amazing staff, and that the two businesses are both products of my own imagination and spirit. My staff and community help me more than I can articulate.”

Image courtesy Beau

Her biggest help with BEAU, obviously, is co-owner Jules Guillemette, who, after culinary school, spent seven years working under award-winning chefs in Seattle and traveling abroad in the French and Italian countryside.

“Jules returned to Vermont in 2012 with plans to take over the family farm and open a meat-processing facility there,” explains Maderia. “I hired Jules to run my charcuterie program at Kismet, shortly after they moved to Montpelier.”

Guillemette grew up in a very Québécois community and thus identifies with French flavors and techniques, many of which have found their way into the European style of BEAU.

“Traveling opened me up,” Guillemette says. “It compelled me to stay close to my French roots. It also showed me that things aren’t so complicated. There are beautiful, simple people making beautiful, simple food everywhere.”

Guillemette and Maderia are determined to bring that beautiful, simple idea of food and friends to the BEAU community through events like butcher and cocktail classes, wine tastings, and speakeasy pop-ups.

“I returned home for love and family,” says Guillemette. “Once home, I realized quickly that I would need to make my own work. It feels amazing to now work in the community I live in.”

Image courtesy Beau

Check out BEAU on its Website, Facebook, and Instagram.

The post Be My BEAU appeared first on Take Magazine.

Brian Huebner is a modern-day snake oil salesman. His Thoreauvian charm comes in handy when he’s pitching his elixir to hesitant buyers. Fire Cider is a concoction several years in the making for Huebner, his sister, Amy, and her husband, Dana St. Pierre, who is the original alchemist behind the trademarked tonic. The three started selling Fire Cider in 2010 at a holiday bazaar in the Berkshires.

Dana St. Pierre, Amy Huebner, and Brian Huebner | Photo by Tony Israel

“Dana started making it based loosely on a family recipe from his German grandmother. He was really battling seasonal allergies,” says Amy, the “kitchen witch” of Pittsfield, Massachusetts-based Shire City Herbals, which manufactures Fire Cider. “He’d throw in the lemon, the orange … things kept getting added in. We had several test batches sitting in our pantry. Then he really perfected the concept and got serious about writing things down.”

The final potion, though still somewhat of a secret, is a heady mix of cider vinegar, horseradish, oranges, honey, lemon, ginger, garlic, habaneros, and turmeric. The scent lies somewhere between zingy salad dressing and spiced cake. The flavor, well, it’s a burn. But a good burn. That’s what they tell reluctant passersby at farmers markets and potential retail outfits.

“We offer samples everywhere we go. Sometimes people think it’s moonshine or hard cider,” says Brian. “We tell them it’s a health tonic and they really need to just try it for themselves. The first sip’s a doozy.”

Fire Cider is not just for health nuts and food purists. The Average Joe crowd bangs back the potent Kool-Aid, too. Amy cites a collective fear of big pharma, and a return to hearty industriousness as part of the reason people are busting out of their comfort zone and flocking to the snake oil.

“It’s the gateway drug to using food as medicine,” she says. “People say they’ve never shopped at their co-op before until they realized that’s the only place they could get the tonic. That’s how it starts.”

You can find Fire Cider just about anywhere, from Terminal B at Logan Airport to soda bars and dark cafes. The tonic is sold in nearly 800 locations across the country. A few celebrities, including Willie Nelson and Elizabeth Warren, have slugged it back. And the producers are just getting started.

“We sent Bernie Sanders some,” Amy laughs. “We wrote ‘Feel the Bern’ on it. I hope he tried it.”

Fire Cider Earl Grey Hot Toddy

Brew one cup of Harney & Son’s Earl Grey tea

Add:

1 1/2 tsp of Fire Cider
1 1/2 tsp of Berkshire Mountain Distiller’s Berkshire Bourbon
(You can substitute any kind of bourbon, but why not drink local?)
1 1/2 tsp of lemon juice
1 tsp of honey or to taste

Makes one-cup serving

The post The Fire Within appeared first on Take Magazine.

The scene inside Mezze Bistro + Bar in Williamstown, Massachusetts at 9:45 p.m. is a lively one. Inside the high-ceilinged room where everybody seems to know one another, a woman with an air of Kim Gordon cool offers wine to a couple camped out in a corner banquette. She is Mezze co-owner Nancy Thomas, and her next stop is the table of five where the patriarch holding forth is Kim Wells, the farmer responsible for the evening’s pork belly special.

Seated at the bar is a guy who raised the cow that provided the milk for one of the night’s cheese selections, Maggie’s Reserve. It was his father, a Williams College economics professor, who in the 1990s took sophomore Bo Peabody, Mezze’s future co-owner, under his wing. Together they created Tripod, an early social-networking startup that would sell several years later in a deal that made Peabody a very wealthy 26-year-old.

Like many tech titans, Peabody existed on take-out. Unlike many tech titans, however, he decided to open a food enterprise in the Berkshires that was a pioneer of farm-to-table dining in the region. In partnership with restaurateur Thomas, his focus on local food back in 1996 was something that the tech world would call an early-adopter play. Today, Mezze Restaurant Group operates the Bistro as well as Allium Restaurant + Bar in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in addition to a catering and event-planning business.

Pork belly, lentils, sprouts, apple cider and watercress at Mezze Bistro + Bar | Photo by Nicholas Moulton

“It’s nice to be in a business where you get to witness customer satisfaction in a real and immediate way,” Peabody says. “In the technology business, it’s all so virtual, and the gratification is often delayed.” He still launches successful technology enterprises as a partner in the venture capital firms Greycroft Partners and Village Ventures, of which he is also a co-founder.

Farm-to-table, nose-to-tail dining – with its inherent high food costs for organic produce and pasture-raised animals, and the skill level required to work with both – isn’t for the faint of heart. There is blight. There are uneven seasons.
Thomas takes it in stride. “I like to say I was a punk-rock kid who is scrappy and enjoys guerrilla survival tactics,” she says.

On March 9, it was showtime for the Mezze Restaurant Group, which presented “Berkshires’ First Taste of Spring Dinner” – fittingly after one of the worst New England winters ever – at the esteemed James Beard House in New York City. There was no room for error, and Thomas’ team was ready. The microgreens were “living” – still planted in their flat from Mill River Farm – and snipped to order on site. The lamb for “Lila’s Mountain Lamb, Quince and Fennel Marmellata” was raised especially for the meal.

James Beard, chef and champion of American cuisine, once famously said, “The only thing that will make a soufflé fall is if it knows you’re afraid of it.” Thomas and her team, led by Mezze chef Nicholas Moulton and Allium chef Daire Rooney, were not afraid.

“Our two kitchen teams came together to share space, cooked their hearts out, and celebrated the moment,” Thomas recalls. “It was a night to remember shared by family, friends, and farmers.”

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