Friday, April 28, 7:00 pm
Members $90, guests, $115

Generally speaking, unless your sheepskin bears the name of a certain Cambridge college, or you’re close friends with someone whose does, you’ll never see the inside of New York City’s Harvard Club. And that’s a shame, because it’s the only place to sample Angelo Ljubicic’s cuisine. Unwilling to miss out on a fabulous meal, we here at the Beard Foundation hatched a plan so ingenious it just might earn us an honorary degree: we’ve invited Ljubicic to cook at our house.

Ljubicic grew up in Istria, Croatia’s largest peninsula. There, the fledgling chef got an early schooling in artisanal food production—his family made its own wine, grappa, and olive oil, cured its own prosciutto, and ground wheat for homemade breads and pastas. In 1970, following a brief stint in Italy, Ljubicic moved to the United States. After honing his culinary skills in several small restaurant kitchens, he spent 11 years cooking for Joe Romano at the Downtown Athletic Club. In 1982, Arnold Fanger, executive chef of the Harvard Club, tapped Ljubicic to serve as his sous-chef. Fifteen years later, when his mentor retired, Ljubicic moved up the ranks to executive chef.

Even during his breaks from the Harvard Club’s kitchen, Ljubicic studiously lands himself behind a stove. He was a guest chef on the Queen Elizabeth 2, he studied at the CIA’s Greystone campus, and he took a hiatus from a recent European vacation to attend culinary classes in Venice. Carrying on a tradition from his Istrian childhood, he grows his own grapes at his home on Long Island. Like his Harvard compatriots, this is a man who has done his homework.