Editor’s note: Unpretentious Palate is the official media partner of Chef’s Harvest.

by TM Petaccia

“I have quite the affinity for Stowe because my wife and I got married there in 2018,” says Freshlist director of operations Matt Martin in talking about this Sunday’s Chef’s Harvest at Daniel Stowe Conservancy in Belmont.

He sees the already sold out garden-stroll event as a chance to sample “ten one-night-only snapshots” of Charlotte-area kitchens in a single evening. Chef’s Harvest will gather ten area chefs to the garden’s Four Seasons Lawn for composed tasting plates built around seasonal ingredients, most sourced from farms in Freshlist’s network of local farms.

Martin sees a parallel between the connection visitors make with nature at Stowe and the relationship Freshlist wants people to develop with the food grown around them. “Combining these incredible chefs with obviously delicious local food in that setting is just kind of one of those things that makes sense,” he says.

He cites the Piedmont Culinary Guild’s former Farm to Fork in the Garden gatherings at the same location as a useful comparison. While that event assembled dozens of chef-and-farmer pairings, Chef’s Harvest is deliberately more compact. “Farm to Fork was a grand party,” Martin says. “There were forty different chef and farmer pairings. The one thing that I wanted to do particularly this year, and hopefully in years moving forward, is to keep it more intimate,” he says.

Martin selected the chefs with an eye toward differences in cuisines, businesses, and styles of service. “It was really about curating different styles of service from establishments throughout the city through one tasting-station sort of event,” he says.

The lineup includes Michael Bader of The Speckled Pear; Callan Buckles of Rada; Vince Giancarlo of Lady Funari; Chayil Johnson of Community Matters Cafe; Michaela Moehring of HEX Kitchen; Nick Moralacci of Restaurant Constance; Matt Moore of Customshop; Dean Orr of PostScript; Sam Sheehan of Ever Andalo; and Mary Jayne Wilson of Thoughtful Baking Co.

Freshlist provided each chef with a stipend to purchase produce through the food hub’s network of farms. Ingredients Freshlist does not carry are being sourced by the chefs through their usual suppliers.

Giancarlo, culinary director of B-Side Hospitality, which includes Vinyl, The Story of Mi Cariño, and the upcoming Lady Funari, will serve capellini with fresh North Carolina crab, chile, lemon, parsley, white wine, and benne seeds.

“I’ve been a fan of the Stowe Botanical Gardens for a long time,” Giancarlo says. “I participated in the garden event years ago. Especially with the near launch of Lady Funari, this is a fantastic opportunity to reach another audience and demonstrate to them what B-Side Hospitality is all about,” he says.

Orr, chef and co-owner of PostScript, will prepare cavatelli with Urban Gourmet Farms mushroom stroganoff and Pecorino Romano.

“Amber and I love visiting the Stowe Conservancy. We go every year when they do the lights at night,” Orr says, referring to wife and PostScript co-owner Amber Donoghue. “When Matt approached us about doing the Harvest, we thought it’d be a great way to continue to support the Stowe Conservancy and Freshlist and spend an evening with some of our friends, regulars, and colleagues.”

For Orr, the evening is also an opportunity to bring together parts of Charlotte’s restaurant community that may not ordinarily cross paths.

“It’s a great opportunity to continue to strengthen our community and expand it, whether it’s meeting new people or introducing our friends and regulars to people they may not meet otherwise,” he says.

Wilson will contribute a fig leaf and peach pie made with a rough-puff pie shell, peach compote, fig leaf diplomat, fig leaf milk crumb, and peach powder. Her answer when Martin invited her to participate was an “obvious and enthusiastic ‘Hell yes!'”

“The Freshlist team has built a network between chefs and farmers that make it possible for busy business owners and chefs to get the very best ingredients this region has to offer,” Wilson says. “Without them as the connective tissue, ‘supporting local’ can be unrealistic and feel out of reach for a lot of people running food businesses in this city. You hear a lot of people talk about ‘supporting local,’ but not everyone actually does it. These people do.”

For guests, Martin says the event offers a low-risk introduction to restaurants they may have been curious about but have yet to visit. “An event like this is a perfect way to sample ten one-night-only snapshots of what these establishments do every day, every week, throughout the calendar year,” he says, “so you can build your own excitement about where to plan your next date night for the price of a normal date night in the city.”

Or, as Orr puts it: “Who doesn’t love a night of music and cooking in the clean air?”

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