Thursday, April 24, 7:00 p.m.
Members $85, guests $110

Seems like if you grow up in a restaurant family, you either love the industry or you run away screaming as soon as you’re able. Luckily for us, Nick Morfogen fell into the first category. When he was a child, his family owned three successful restaurants in the New York area, and he learned to cook at the knees of his dad, his uncles, and his Aunt Alexandra. Happy memories of those days set in motion a career that has taken him from London to Hyde Park (New York), from the Napa Valley to the Florida Coast.

These days, Morfogen is flourishing as partner and executive chef of 32 East in the trendy Old School Square historic district of Delray Beach, Florida. As Florida Trend’s Robert Tolf wrote, “This two-story haven of heavenly food and high spirits remains at the summit thanks to highly skilled management, great service and magnificent cheffing by Nick Morfogen.”

Morfogen embarked on his career with a post–high school trip to London, where he settled for a time, working in restaurants and bars. That experience convinced him that he wanted to be a chef, so he returned to the United States and enrolled at the CIA. His uncle, a fish buyer for Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, helped him get off to an excellent start by arranging for Morfogen to intern at Le Bernardin. After graduation, he spent time at La Côte Basque and Le Cirque before picking up his knives and heading west. He served as executive sous-chef under Michael Chiarello at Tra Vigne, but it was at Ajax Tavern in Aspen that Morfogen’s career took off, and in 1996, Food & Wine named him to their annual list of Best New Chefs.

While he liked the metaphorical heights, he didn’t like the physical ones. Morfogen returned to sea level at 32 East, “part neighborhood tavern, part big-city bistro,” according to John Tanasychuk of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “It’s sophisticated without being pretentious, much like chef Nick Morfogen’s menu.” April Witt of the Miami Herald also praised the “constantly surprising” cuisine. Morfogen, she wrote, “seems incapable of the culinary cliché. He combines fine, fresh ingredients in new ways, and does it so successfully the combination seems inevitable.” But let’s give the last word to Sara and Monty Preiser, who ended a glowing review in the Boca Raton News thus: “Not much more to say here. Except ‘Go.’”