Event Location:
Boca Raton Resort & Club
Cathedral Dining Room
501 E. Camino Real.

Cocktail reception 7:00 p.m., Dinner 8:00 p.m.
Members $225 plus tax, guests $250 plus tax.

For reservations or more information, please call 561.447.3394.

Our usual m.o. here at the Beard Foundation is to invite chefs from around the country, and sometimes from around the world, to cook for an evening at the house that Jim built. But sometimes the setting for a restaurant is so spectacular that we really feel we can’t do the food justice without the surroundings. In those instances, we occasionally take our show on the road. A case in point are the restaurants of the posh Boca Raton Resort & Club, a legendary 356-acre oceanfront property on Florida’s Gold Coast.

Although the resort opened its doors in 1926, if you haven’t been there lately, you really haven’t been. Several years ago, the hotel spent $150 million on capital improvements, “much of them dedicated to beefing up its culinary offerings,” according to Restaurants & Institutions. It was money well spent. Today, the three fine-dining venues at Boca Raton Resort & Club are among the best restaurants in the state. As Beth Landman Keil wrote in New York magazine, “The most significant sign that Boca is no longer worth visiting only if your grandparents have a condo there is the arrival of some serious new restaurants, including Drew Nieporent’s Lucca, a Nick’s Fishmarket, and the gourmet 27 Ocean Blue, complete with wraparound ocean view from the top of the Tower building.”

Lucca, Nieporent’s waterfront Tuscan fantasy, is overseen by executive chef Carey Savona, who nightly puts into practice his culinary philosophy that cuisine should be “honest, simple, unfussed, yet elaborate regarding the components.” Savona has been cooking since he was mere lad of 14. Before becoming Pasta Potentate and Ruler of Risotto at Lucca (designed, by the way, by David Rockwell), he consulted and cooked in Connecticut at Luna, Wildfire, and Cobb’s Mill Inn, and in San Francisco at The Marine’s Memorial Club. Writing in Old Town Crier after a meal at Lucca, Rick Casey noted, “The entire meal of items such as lobster-stuffed pasta followed by a magnificent Chilean sea bass was an artistic palate pleaser.”

Nick’s Fishmarket is the brainchild of another well-known restaurateur, in this case Nick Nickolas. Fishmarket executive chef Louis Ellenbogen started at Nick’s as sauté chef eight years ago; these days, he runs the seafood show in the Boca locale. Ellenbogen’s previous credits include six years as executive chef/assistant food & beverage manager at the Bahia Cabanac Beach Resort in nearby Ft. Lauderdale.

27 Ocean Blue, “located on the 27th floor of the Tower with staggering views of the coastline,” according to Boston Herald writer Holly Reich, is a concept cooked up by Boca Raton Resort & Club executive chef James Reaux and is the ideal setting for a meal of Reaux’s signature “coastal cuisine.” The restaurant fuses influences from around the world, from Asia to Latin America. “Don’t even think about leaving without tasting the spectacular lobster bisque, undeniably the best we ever tasted,” Sally Moe wrote in AAA Going Places Magazine.

But 27 Ocean Blue is just a small part of Reaux’s responsibilities. As executive chef for the entire resort, he oversees all culinary operations from restaurants to banquets to room service. His résumé is a veritable address book of deluxe resorts, including the Century Plaza Hotel and Towers in Los Angeles and the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in Hawaii. Day-to-day operations at 27 Ocean Blue fall to executive chef Rick Boyer, an alum of a number of prestigious Arizona kitchens including the Arizona Biltmore, The Citadel, the Royal Palms, and Mary Elaine’s at the Phoenician, as well as the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs.

What’s a resort vacation if you can’t indulge? Executive pastry chef Jean Spielmann oversees culinary indulgences of the sweet sort at Boca Raton Resort, a job that gives him responsibility for 19 different food and beverage operations. Spielmann trained in Switzerland and at Ecole Le Nôtre in Paris. His experiences in New World pastry kitchens encompass the Broadmoor, Elbow Beach Hotel in Bermuda, the Four Seasons Hotel in Calgary, Canada, and the Winnipeg Inn in Winnipeg, Canada.

Cristina Mariani-May will also be on hand during this very special Centennial dinner to discuss the Banfi wines being poured from her family’s estate.

Writing in New York magazine, Beth Landman Kiel was surprised to find that Boca Raton had “unexpectedly morph[ed] into a restaurant mecca.” The city has become, she wrote, “the kind of destination from which foodie fantasies are made.”