The happening place to be the evening of April 26 was an unlikely location: a complex of buildings and warehouses on the lip of the Napa Airport.
From 4:30 until somewhere around 9 p.m., a steady stream of cars pulled up to the entrance of a white, nondescript building, where valets competed for the privilege of parking vehicle after vehicle. Arriving guests were greeted with flutes of champagne served from a tray, as they streamed through a reception area decked out with huge white-and-green bouquets of delicate orchids, exotic anthuriums and pristine calla lilies.
If ever there were an example of industrial chic, this was it.
Elaine Bell, one of the best and best-known caterers in the wine country, relocated from Sonoma to Napa last year as her ever-expanding business required more and more space in which to function. Sonoma Valley, though, still considers her one of our own.
As every host and hostess knows, guests inevitably gravitate to the kitchen, where all the best parties wind up. But who has a 25,000-square-foot kitchen? As it turned out, every square foot was needed to accommodate the evening’s crowd.
Over the course of the event, some 900 invited guests traipsed through the mesmerizing maze of kitchens and side rooms, all of them stocked to the rafters with hors d’oeuvres and wild combinations of small plates. In many cases, the food itself doubled as decoration; in one area, dozens of cylindrical vases were filled with delphinium blooms and topped with small white plates anointed with a variety of divine finger foods. In all, there were at least three dozen different dishes created especially for this celebratory blast.
If you had inside information, you knew the first food station to visit was the one tucked inside a walk-in. Perfectly chilled, the space was the ideal location for a seafood extravaganza that incorporated New Zealand green-lipped mussels, Hog Island oysters, seared sea scallops with a pea-leek puree, sesame-ahi squares with mango salsa and much, much more.
People meandered among a dozen or more food stations preferring dim sum, short ribs, caviar (served with chilled spoons) and Yong Suk’s mung bean pancakes made from the Korean-born chef’s secret recipe. Everything was absolutely irresistible (except, perhaps, for the foie gras crème brulee, which some guests declined on the basis of preferring that their fat calories come from either meat or dairy but not from both categories).
“This is great food,” said Stephanie Pugash, who co-founded the Sonoma + Jazz Festival with her late husband, Jim. “It’s a happening place to be. Elaine does all the catering for the jazz festival.”
Laura Ponter, who owns Spirits in Stone, is another Bell fan. “This is magical,” she said. “It’s fun, it’s alive and it’s happening. Elaine throw a party and when you walk in the door, you know the party is on!”
Known almost as much for her creative cooking as for her cool under pressure, Bell was definitely the belle of the ball, decked out in a slinky black outfit in lieu of her usual chef’s garb.
Many guests who ventured past the kitchen area may have felt like Alice In Wonderland when they discovered a series of rooms towards the back of the warehouse, most of them featuring a full-service bar and additional displays of appetizers.
The ultimate jaw-dropper was the last room, a cavernous space where Pride & Joy played the kind of must-dance music that lured dozens of happy campers to their feet and out onto the floor. Elegant settees and love seats offered rest for the weary between music sets (oh, please, someone peel me a grape!).
The back of the space was filled with a half-circle of even more food tables, these holding innumerable cheeses, breads, fruits and accompaniments, with the final row devoted to countless variations on gourmet cupcakes. Adding a final, almost hallucinatory element to the scene, a towering figure, dressed in red, floated above the crowd, dancing solo atop impossibly high stilts.