Friday, June 27, 7:00 p.m.
Members $85, guests $110

Back in early 2000, Jody Denton was at the top of his Bay Area game. At LuLu, Denton “made hearty, homey, Cal-Mediterranean cuisine more popular than straight white teeth and money in the bank among the Bay Area’s prime foodie set,” Bill Citara wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. Next door at Azie, an “exotic and exciting and quite engaging mix of Michelin-star ambitions, Asian ingredients and California eclecticism,” as Citara described it, Denton fed newly minted Silicon Valley millionaires “stunningly original food” that was at once “muscular and delicate” (per Caroline Bates in Gourmet). Denton’s restaurants incarnated the two faces of San Francisco, she continued, “one, an indoor Roman piazza riffing on the Mediterranean food that is the city’s unofficial cuisine; the other, like a crowded Asian street, hinting at erotic encounters and culinary adventures.”

Success hadn’t come overnight. Denton had worked for 25 years under some of the best in the business, including Wolfgang Puck, Dean Fearing, Mark Miller, and Richard Melman. The Eccentric and The Big Bowl Café in Chicago, Eureka and the Hotel Bel-Air in L.A., and the renowned Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas were among the restaurants on his dance card. Not surprising that he was flying high with LuLu and Azie. By 2000, Denton’s job description also included oversight of Zibibbo in Palo Alto, a favorite of Gourmet readers, and the operations of a catering service and gourmet product company. Until a chance professional obligation gradually changed his life, he was perfectly happy feeding dot-com diners all over the Bay Area. But in 1995, he was invited to participate in a benefit dinner in Bend, Oregon, a small town 175 miles from Portland, and he fell in love with the place.

He returned to Bend year after year, and at some point it occurred to him that an annual visit wasn’t enough. So in 2002, he bought a 100-year-old brick building in Bend’s historic downtown, renovated it, and opened Merenda. Its warm atmosphere and rustic food have been embraced by Oregonians. Merenda features a changing menu of country French and Italian dishes—many made in a wood-burning oven—like suckling pig, iron skillet–roasted mussels, and tarte Tatin. It was an instant hit. Merenda is “the hottest new spot in Oregon,” Jonathan Nicholas wrote in The Oregonian. “Just how busy is Merenda? It’s even hard to get a reservation at 5 p.m. on a Sunday.”