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Intimate dinner gatherings honoring Southern chefs.
Proceeds from your ticket purchase of the 2021 Trifoliate Award Dinners go to This Postage Stamp of Native Soil, a non-profit oral history project based in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. All ticket costs above $150 per ticket are tax deductible.
ABOUT THE CHEF
Chef Brian So is a master of subtlety. His exacting compositions are pure, simple – what some might call “honest” food. Driven by a reverence for high-quality, peak-season ingredients, he doesn’t need to rely on gimmicks, trends or heavy-handed manipulation. He lets the food speak for itself. The CIA graduate is grounded in French technique, which he further honed during a year staging at acclaimed San Francisco restaurants, including Benu, Quince, and Coi. He returned to Atlanta to join the culinary crew at One-Eared Stag and later helped open Korean-Southern fusion restaurant Sobban in Decatur. So could take his talents anywhere, but the Kennesaw native kept things close to home when he opened his restaurant, Spring, in an old train depot off the historic Marietta Square in 2016. So defies the norm with a New American menu that is strikingly brief. Yet, each dish brings a beautiful balance of flavors, texture and color – a soft-spoken statement that less can be more.
ABOUT THE TRIFOLIATE AWARD DINNER SERIES
In early November of 2020, John Kessler was lost in the woods. The late evening light was fading and the winter air was becoming cold. Kessler, one of the better known food writers in the country, was on a writing retreat with AIR Serenbe and had gone for a hike in the woods, but had lost his way.
The woods were Serenbe, Chattahoochee Hills in rural Georgia, and spending a winter’s night was not a healthy prospect. His phone had no signal and the battery was dying.
Then he caught a sharp whiff of citrus, and remembered the overgrown grove of trifoliate oranges he’d seen earlier in the day and knew where he was. He stopped and harvested some of the bitter fruit as he made his way back to his artist cottage. A lip-puckering marmalade followed. (He wrote about his adventure for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)
When the idea for a culinary award series was dreamed up a few nights later over dinner at The Farmhouse at Serenbe, the idea of these bright orange fruits leading the way out of the dark woods felt like a metaphor for the hoped for end of COVID.
The Trifoliate Awards were created as an annual series to exult culinary excellence in the American South. Conceived during the COVID-19 lockdown, these inaugural awards are intended to celebrate and give a platform to the leading voices who have emerged in this trying new reality. We honor these chefs for work that is fresh and original, that delights their guests, inspires their peers, and pushes forward the meaning of Southern food. The honorees were selected by noted food journalists John Kessler, Christiane Lauterbach, and Ligaya Figueras in collaboration with chef Nicolas Bour.
Each award dinner will be an intimate gathering held at The Farmhouse at Serenbe. The chef’s menu will emphasize a sense of place, with many of the ingredients harvested mere steps from the dining table. The meals will be produced with the assistance of chef Bour, and the dinner experience will be designed as a collaboration between the featured chef honoree and noted event designer Kristin Genet and artist Rachel K. Garceau, embracing the landscape surrounding The Farmhouse. Though each event will vary in tone and presentation, attendees will enjoy signature cocktails, wine pairings, and art performances.
Learn more at trifoliates.com
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