Elements Restaurant & Bar: CATERING TO THE STARS

By Lisa Snider, findingojai@aol.com

For Chef Paul Becking, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival is still a blur. Elements Restaurant took center stage during the nine-day festival, catering hospitality suites and green rooms by day and celebrity studded after-parties by night, all while handling the day-to-day operations of their full service downtown restaurant and bar.

As a sponsor of the 22nd annual festival, Elements was tapped to cater the Montecito Award Tribute party for Dreamgirls director Bill Condon, as well as the American Riviera Award Tribute party for Forest Whitaker of The Last King of Scotland. (Dreamgirls and Whitaker both would become Oscar winners a few weeks later.) With the spotlight on Chef Paul to deliver memorable and tasty fare to 500 revelers, the pressure was on. But he answered the call with chic, themed menus that turned the food at the festival’s after-parties into conversation pieces all their own.

For Condon’s party at Q’s Restaurant, the theme was “Heaven and Hell.” The theme worked well for the site, which has rooms both upstairs and downstairs. For Hell, Chef Paul created Spicy Soulkeeper’s Chicken Satchels, Devil Fish Bruschetta and Duck Rolls with Blood Orange Sambal Sauce. In Heaven, light hors d’oeuvres and desserts such as petite fours, meringues and macaroons pleased palates and lifted spirits.

Later in the week, Whitaker’s event was the “Red Party” at a furniture warehouse on lower State Street. Chef Paul chose red foods such as Chinese red pork mini buns, red mole-and-chicken quesadillas and strawberry mousse profi teroles. A selection of bright red sauces accompanied the shrimp station. Sending a workforce off-site for late-night parties following a night with a full reservation book was no easy task, but Chef Paul was able to staff events with just a half dozen employees, sometimes calling in favors with his other chef friends. Most of the food was prepped and trayed up at Elements’ back kitchen and then trucked over to the event site. Suffice it to say, snafus could easily become par for the course at any time, as was the case during one highprofile event when the oven refused to cooperate. “It was way too late to call a repair man,” Becking recalls. So he improvised by cutting out a menu item and rigging equipment. “That’s part of any catering experience. Something’s always wrong. You just gotta figure it out.” And the key to that night’s success lay in the fact no patron was the wiser.

While all this was going on, Bernadette Pometta, Elements’ Special Events Coordinator, was charged with creating green room specialty items for VIPs. One green room of note was for none other than celeb-royalty couple Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, who requested turkey and dairy-free high-protein foods. (Tom Cruise presented the Festival’s Modern Master Award to actor Will Smith.)

Back at Elements, Bar Manager Jessica Castillo was dreaming up a distinctive concoction for festival attendees. One day, she saw star anise on an entrée in the kitchen. "Paul was using it in Chinese short ribs, and I saw them and thought, they’re so pretty!" She knew they would be perfect for a festival-themed cocktail. The star anise was made into syrup, mixed with vodka, lemon and blood orange juice and poured into a glass with a salt and sugar rim. And voila, the Starlet was born. It became so popular, it’s now on the regular bar menu.

Lisa Snider is an Ojai resident and local freelance writer. Her other columns
are featured on her website, www.findingojai.com.