Arlene Stein is moving the Terroir hospitality forum forward.
Arlene Stein is excited. She’s on the phone from her home base in Berlin, where she has finalized the agenda for her latest project, a Terroir Forum in Budapest on October 30th. The Budapest forum, which is part of a larger Hungarian culinary tour, which includes visits to wine country near Lake Balaton, is the latest manifestation of the Terroir Hospitality project she founded in Toronto with the first Terroir Symposium in February of 2007. It follows another European Terroir Talk, which was held in Berlin last May. Arlene, who in full disclosure is a good friend and former colleague, explains that the new Learning Forums and Terroir Talk format is not an attempt to recreate the Terroir Symposium, which draws 500 attendees and some of the world’s most famous chefs every year.
The Budapest Terroir Talk is a relatively small, or in her word “focused”, event drawing on about 20 culinary experts and professionals roughly split between Hungarians and internationals, including chef Amanda Cohen from New York’s Dirt Candy, British wine writer Fiona Beckett and chef Albert Ponzo, formerly of Le Select in Toronto and soon The Royal Hotel in Prince Edward County. Ponzo, Arlene reminds me, is a great fan and promoter of the Hungarian heritage breed pig, the Mangalitsa. The forum itself, she explained is limited to about a 100 attendees, making for an intimate day of professional exchange, and then an even smaller break-off group to explore the food and wine of the Balaton country.
For more information on the Terroir Talk Learing Forum in Budapest and Balaton click here.
