Wednesday, June 15, 7:00 pm
Members $100, guests $125

What a bunch of cheese-heads. No, we’re not talking about those Green Bay Packers fanatics with foam hats, but a group of chefs who can’t get enough of Wisconsin’s cheese. This June we will welcome the five newest members of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board’s Chef Ambassador program. In its second year, the program selects some of the nation’s best chefs to represent the region’s biggest industry—almost nine out of every ten pounds of milk produced in Wisconsin is used to make the state’s 350 varieties of cheese.

Certified master chef Tom Catherall hit the Atlanta restaurant scene with a mighty force. Born and raised in England, Catherall landed in Atlanta after cooking in restaurants and hotels around the world. This experience helped his restaurant conglomerate, Here to Serve Restaurants, tap into more than a few Atlanta food niches with eateries including a steakhouse, a sushi bar, a tapas restaurant, and a chicken shack.

Seth Bixby Daugherty is on top of his game. Not only is his restaurant, Cosmos at Le Meridien, booming, but he was also recently named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs of 2005. After training at the CIA, Daugherty moved on to complete a three-year apprenticeship at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. From there he served as sous-chef at The Four Seasons restaurant in New York, before leaving the East coast to become the opening chef of Paul’s Creekside Grill at Silvercreek in Colorado. He came to Minneapolis as executive chef at D’Amico Cucina, and has been the chef at Cosmos since it opened in 2003.

It seems that not a month goes by without James Beard Award winner Roberto Donna appearing in our calendar. And it’s no wonder, because Donna has been setting the standard for Italian cuisine in the United States since he opened his first restaurant, Galileo, in Washington, D.C., in 1984. Donna now has six restaurants in our nation’s capital, running the gamut from fine dining at Galileo (named one of the ten Best Italian Restaurants in America by Wine Spectator) to his decidedly more casual all-you-can-eat concept, Il Radicchio.

Although he loves to hit the waves, Trey Foshee isn’t your stereotypical surfer slacker. In fact, it seems virtually impossible to catch this guy, either in the kitchen or the ocean. Another Food & Wine Best New Chef (he made the list in 1998), Foshee seems to

prefer to cook in locales that border the Pacific. He’s worked in several Los Angeles kitchens, including L’Orangerie, and was executive chef at Mauna Lani Bay Hotel in Hawaii. He ventured away from the coast to be chef at Robert Redford’s Sundance Resort in Utah, but dashed right back to assume the position of top chef at George’s at the Cove in La Jolla, where he is also partner.

Goose Sorenson has truly risen through the ranks of the cooking world. Making his start as the cook for his fraternity house in his native Wyoming, Sorenson moved on to study cooking at the Art Institute of Colorado while he worked at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. He went on to work at Denver’s Tante Louise before becoming executive chef at Starfish, which he subsequently bought. A year later, Sorenson sold the restaurant to his partner and went home to Wyoming. Not quite finished with the Mile High City, Sorensen returned several years later to open Solera with his partner, Brian Klingingsmith.