My first stop at Chicago Gourmet on Saturday was a seminar about baking techniques. Almost immediately, I was worried. We were in a dimly lit room in the basement of The Gage. There were maybe ten tables in the place, each one holding three people. In the front of the room was another table where pastry chefs Mindy Segal and Pichet Ong were sitting. Nobody seemed to have a plan, until an unnamed woman came to the front, announced that Mindy and Pichet were going to have an “impromptu conversation,” and promptly walked away. The two chefs looked at each other expectantly—I think they were each hoping the other would take the reins—and I feared I was in for a long, awkward hour.

But Segal took control and what transpired turned out to be an interesting conversation about the use of chemicals in baking. (Foam—Ong’s penchant for it and Segal’s original resistance to it—was a recurring theme. At one point Segal admitted “I’m in therapy” for her resistance to new techniques.)

One disaster averted, I went to the main pavilion to see how things were going. The first person I ran into was an assistant of one of Chicago’s more famous chefs. “Everybody’s complaining about the food,” she told me. “Everybody’s saying that this is great if you’re an alcoholic, but where’s the fucking food?”

Actually, it wasn’t hard to find the food—one needed only to glance around the lawn and find the booths with the longest lines, of which there were maybe half a dozen sprinkled in with the endless rows of wine booths. I got into the Pastoral line, and what they were serving at the time—Oakvale Farmstead Cheese—was really fabulous. But they had hundreds of people to feed, and their portions were accordingly tiny. The portion was so small and the line so long that when I dropped a piece of cheese into the grass I invoked the five-second rule and put it right into my mouth.

This was more or less how things went. I waited in line, got some decent food, drank some decent wines and stood in line some more. For some reason there was no line at The Bristol’s stand, so I filled up on their delicious panzanella; otherwise the combination of wine and sun might have had me passed out on the lawn. It was either that or head to the conspicuous Dunkin’ Donuts stand.
—David Tamarkin

Although David and I attended separately, apparently we were both drawn to the Segal/Ong pairing. The duo took control of a haphazard set-up again, this time at their cooking demo on the stage of the Pritzker Pavilion. Each chef prepared an apple pie: Segal’s was a more traditional incarnation, while Ong made something that more closely resembled a bacon-apple empanada. It looked incredible—I say “looked” because in keeping with the theme of the event, there was no food for onlookers to taste. Nor could I try to recreate the dish myself, since there weren’t any recipes distributed.

Still, Segal and Ong’s demo went much more smoothly than the others I caught. Terrance Brennan looked positively morose throughout his demo, and with reasonable cause: His food arrived half an hour late, and some ingredients were missing. He and Michael Kornick made the most of the situation, but there was no getting over the awkwardness of the set-up: two chefs, simultaneously cooking food that had nothing in common, as NBC 5 reporter LeeAnn Trotter attempted to moderate the “show.”

Winding my way through the pavilion’s labrynthine corridors, I discovered the choral room, where many of the wine seminars were held. I found myself at a syrah tasting with Joe Spellman, a master sommelier. While the ticket price was $90, some friends I met up with at the festival had no problem just walking in: there was no one at the door checking off names. Perhaps since the seminar room was only about half-full, maybe they just more concerned about filling the space. The presentation was satisfying but a little uninspired, sort of like the wines themselves.

On Sunday I attempted to see whether I could leave full if I ate every available item of food. I started with a lick of one of Graham Elliot’s foie-lipops, a bite of a doughnut from the Blackbird/Publican station (without a doubt that best thing I ate at the fest), a crab-and-corn salad from Shawn McClain and a sad plate of mixed greens, asparagus (Really? In September?) and a solitary shrimp from the Washburne Culinary Institute. Then I raided Fox & Obel, Pastoral and even Phil Stefani’s. But like many of the other attendees, I left hungry.
—Julia Kramer