We turn the blog over today to Josh Galliano, the intrepid chef at An American Place, 822 Washington Avenue downtown. Josh had the honor of cooking at the James Beard post-awards gala; he even snagged a mention from past Beard-award-winner Rick Nelson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Anyway, Josh sent me a memoir of his experiences and was kind enough to let me put it out here for y’all to read.

This can in no way do my experience at the Beard Gala any justice. However, I’ll sum it up as the greatest cooking experience of my life! My wife went with me to help plate, and she said it was the most she has seen me smile in a long time. That may have been because I was stressed out with trying to prep for the event and then send everything to New York.

I really could not have done this event as easily as I did had it not been for Daniel Boulud and Jean Francois Bruel, both of Restaurant Daniel. They opened up their kitchen despite doing a party in Connecticut for 1000 that weekend, and they helped transport all of the prepped items to Bar Boulud, which was much closer to the event site. Plus, some old friends are in charge of the Bar Boulud kitchen, so I was able to borrow, ransack, and barter some needed items off of them.

I didn’t think ahead as to how best to accomplish braised pork belly. I sous-vide cooked the belly in St. Louis, but I needed to crisp the skin in New York. I bought a pancake griddle that did the trick, but not fast enough. At one point, my sous chef Chris told me we were almost out of butane for the burners and that we would soon have no more crispy pork belly. Luckily, with the help of Tory Miller, we kept the bellies crisping. The atmosphere was unbelievable, with plenty of chefs willing to help each other. We helped move the prep for the chefs from Prairie Grass Cafe just because I knew they were from Illinois, too.

Feeding everyone was a lot of work. For at least 2 1/2 hours, my head was down in pork belly. I did get a chance to go around and look at other people’s food. I think I may have had one of the most involved dishes, but Tory’s Highland beef was also involved as were the duck sliders. Without planning it, we lured people to our booth because they smelled the belly crisping! That definitely helped seeing how we were not in the middle of the human crush of downstairs by all the cool people (Silverton, Nischan, Vetri) or outside of the entrance to the theatre.

Upon breaking down our station, we realized that we had 40 lbs. of sv pork belly (out of the original 160 lbs…my accountant definitely didn’t like that FedEx bill). So, we started donating pork belly to all the student interns and New York restaurants. At one point, Bill Telepan, who did a fantastic version of poached eggs and scrapple, declared “NO MORE PORK BELLY!” Thus, we gave the rest of it to my friend Damien, the chef at Bar Boulud.

Like I said, it was amazing and I loved the fact that I finally was able to give something back to the Beard Organization since they gave me a scholarship to go to culinary school.