UPCOMING: City Harvest Hosts 9th Annual Summer in the City

Next week, Generation Harvest – the young professionals group within City Harvest – will host its 9th annual Summer in the City event at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The event, which attracts the city’s hottest chefs and mixologists, will be Tuesday, June 22 from 7:30PM to 10:00PM.

The event will benefit City Harvest, a New York City food rescue operation that feeds the city’s hungry. Some of the participating restaurants include Ed’s Chowder House, Oceana, Serafina, and L’Artusi.

Appetite for Good sat down with L’Artusi’s chef Gabe Thompson to find out why he chose to support City Harvest: “I found out about City Harvest at Le Bernardin. [Eric Ripert is] a big supporter of City Harvest. I think it’s a fantastic organization. Picking up food that normally gets thrown away can go to feed people who can’t feed themselves. Makes yourself feel good about food that you can’t sell. What are you going to do with the beef soup from yesterday? You can utilize product that you don’t have use for.”

As to other organizations and causes he feels strongly about, Gabe replied, “We do a lot of events. We organized one for Foundation Rwanda. That’s a pretty cool cause. Donations go towards secondary education for children in Rwanda. Let Us Eat Local is another one. Everything we serve we source from a number of local breweries. Brings attention to the great food in the city. We also do cancer benefits. But City Harvest and Foundation Rwanda are our biggest focus.”

We switched gears a little bit and asked him about how he creates new dishes: “Sometimes I go to the market where I see something new…If you know you want a fish dish and your purveyor tells you that this and this is in season, then ideas come to you. There’s a lot of brainstorming. Most of it for me is kind of haphazard. I think about how I want it to look, what flavors I want, what season it is and what will sell. It’s about knowing your guests and market. I often bounce ideas off of my wife. Why don’t you do this and this? We work together and think about things we’ve done in the past. Bring back something popular. A lot of the best things we’ve had on the menu is when we have too much of something in the restaurant. Like what are we gonna do with this stuff?”

Indeed.

And what idea does he plan to dish out (see what I did there?) for Summer in the City? “Lamb ragout sliders,” he replied. “Originally, we made it for Streets International. The idea behind it is street food, since the organization helps kids off the streets in Southeast Asia. I was going to make tripe sliders and it tasted disgusting.”

Tripe sliders? Disgusting? Surely you jest!

“So we went with lamb and it turned out looking like a sloppy joe kind of mixture. So I said let’s just do that. And people really like it.”

But don’t take Chef Gabe Thompson’s word for it – taste for yourself at Summer in the City this Tuesday, June 22 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea.

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• City Harvest Shows Chelsea What Summer Tastes Like
• 21 Club Donates 1,000 Pounds of Food to City Harvest
• City Harvest Spreads the Matzah with Passover Food Drive
• Hot Times (and Hot Bites!) at Summer in the City