Wally’s 8th Annual Celebration

Wally’s Wine & Spirits held ii’s annual Food and Wine Celebration to benefit the Michael Bonaccorsi UC Davis Scholarship Fund and the Michael Bonaccorsi Endowment at Allen Hancock College. Unlike most food and/​or spirits festivals in LA, this one featured a mixture of not just LA area establishments but also those in the Central Coast of California from Santa Barbara on northward. At $ 95 per attendee just for the regular admission ($ 149 for VIP) this event is by no means cheap. But it is an incredible adventure no matter if you’re a food or wine connoisseur… or you’re both.
The Wine tent is the first thing you see. OK, actually the first thing you see is the rows of Reidel glassware in the center and the LA Weekly booth on the left. Then you see all the wineries. They encompass the entire hall save for two breweries (Firestone and Telegraph) and the silent auction area. The silent auction mainly offered large bottles of wine, dinner gift certificates and stays at practically every Intercontinental Hotel in existence. There was other items from SoCo surfboards (because nothing speaks New Orleans than… surfing!) and a four pack of Dodger tickets although I kept wondering if those bids were really to support the McCourt Foundation rather than the Bonaccorsi one. There was even a week long stay at Martha’s Vineyard for 10 if you can rustle up that many friends to go.
Not being a big wine snob, I concentrated mostly on the food area which was open air with a series of tables in the middle and end of the event area. There were four and five star restaurants all over the place. Started out with Oysters shucked on site from the Oyster Company and then went to for Lobster Rolls from Brothers’ Restaurant at Mattei’s Tavern. Amazingly for this ex-​East Coaster, I’ve never had a Lobster Roll before so this was an experience for a variety of reasons. Lobster was fresh and succulent and the roll was crusty and probably a far cry from the standard hot dog-​like roll you’d find at New England seafood haunts.
Moved on to Full of Life Flatbread Pizza which is not just a restaurant in Los Alamos but also a frozen pizza line you can find at Whole Foods. Bonus points for bringing their own pizza oven! And what an oven. Looked like a art deco domed oven with all sorts of artsy tiles around it. As for the pizza, they did two styles. A Rabbit pizza and a Goat Cheese one. Both had a great crust and you could tell the ovens had a lot to do with that. Mezze did a Shawarma Taco which was pretty good but not as good as the Fish Tacos Lucques/​Tavern were serving up a few booths away. Artisan in Paso Robles also had one of the best assortments of the day including a unique spin on the corn dog and potato salad and also they were really smart in that they brought out cups of Sheep’s Milk Ice Cream with a Bing Cherry Sauce.
Next to that was one of the hottest restaurants in town,
followed up by something unusual. Bouchon Bakery and Hitching Post which were right next to each other and served… BBQ Pork Sliders! So who won this food war? Bouchon. Pork was good at both but the Hitching Post bun was a bit hard and the Bouchon bun was soft and pretty much perfect.
Melisse served up this very unique fish. So unique I can’t even remember the name. They served it in small cups like it was a sample from Costco. This fish was so well cooked and seasoned it really was one of the best fish bites I’ve ever sampled.
While there were a lot of big winners that day, there were some losers and they all seemed to be in the same area. Mozza didn’t bring it’s pizza, instead brought a bread and cheese plate that a lot of other people mistook as a dessert. Bread was good but it was still underwhelming considering what they could’ve brought. Same thing for Hungry Cat which brought out a salad that looked like it had a big piece of salmon on the bottom of the plate, but in reality it was just bread. The big loser was Spago/​Cut which had three dishes but might have wanted to stop at one. Their Banh Mi was acceptable but their slider was actually raw inside. Could not believe it as I bit into it. The dessert was a sorbet with some kind of pastry next to it. The sorbet was fine but the pastry was very hard. And the most popular item? Fiji Water! They could not keep this in the coolers as the day progressed.
While this was a tremendous event, there were a few things I noticed that were sorely lacking. For starters, no recycling bins! And when I went back to my car to put something away, a Wally’s rep stopped me halfway up the block to return my glass! Huh? We don’t get to keep it? I know I don’t need any more glasses but this looked really tacky and there should’ve been a sign or place somewhere to return them. I’ve been to wine/​beer tasting at a ¹⁄₃ of the price that let you keep the glass.
So fix a couple of the little things and this can be a five star event. Still over 700 people had a killer time for a hot Sunday afternoon.