Mise En Place set up (Submitted)
Saint John Ale House chef and owner Jesse Vergen and fellow restauranteur Peter Stoddart are teaming up for Mise En Place, a live virtual cooking event for the Loch Lomond Villa Foundation.
Cathy Taylor, Executive Director of the Loch Lomond Villa Foundation, says people participating in the February 26 event will be sent all the ingredients for dinner and dessert for two in an insulated cooler bag, along with a bottle of wine and the link to the live cooking class hosted by Vergen and Stoddart.
Taylor adds the fundraiser is an opportunity for both the hospitality industry and long-term care community, two sectors hit hard by Covid-19, to think outside of the box and work together to support each other while raising funds for the Loch Lomond Villa Foundation.
“We think that this is a unique way to reach out to our supporters and people in our community that recognize what long-term care facilities and homes have been through over the past year and lend a hand to help us get things back on track,” Taylor said.
Vergen shared that Taylor reached out to him and Stoddart, who collectively brainstormed the virtual event to replace the foundation’s popular annual lobster dinner fundraiser.
“We were trying to keep it so that it was accessible to home cooks,” Vergen explains. “When you’re doing a mass cooking demonstration and people are cooking at home, you don’t want to throw things at them and do weird cooking techniques so that people might find difficult.”
The cooking class was deliberately structured as a dinner-for-two or a family event due to uncertainty over what Covid-19 recovery phase the province would be in at the time of the fundraiser.
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- Mise En Place chef Jesse Vergen (Submitted)
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- Cooking for two at Mise En Place (Submitted)
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- Saint John restauranteur Peter Stoddart (Submitted)
“This event is pretty bulletproof in the aspect that it wouldn’t even really matter if we were in the red [zone], we could still do the event because it’s online and people are just doing curbside pickup for their boxes at their houses,” Vergen said.
The live virtual class will let people feel like they are a chef as they cook a choice of two dinner options with locally sourced ingredients, guided by two Saint John culinary mainstays.
“The chemistry between Peter and Jesse is pretty electric, they had been business partners for a long time,” said Taylor. “They’ve got a kind of a special bond and it’s quite a humorous thing to see them working together – we’re really excited about that and it should be an entertaining and fun-filled night.”
Taylor says sales for the virtual event have been brisk, with the foundation’s goal to sell between 200-400 tickets.
Anyone interested in participating can check for tickets on Mise En Place’s Facebook and Eventbrite pages.
“I think that this is potentially something that if it goes well and it meets the objectives of everybody, (and most importantly if everybody has fun and wants us to do it again), we will certainly revisit it,” Taylor said.
This story was originally published on Huddle.Today – an Acadia Broadcasting Limited content partner.
