“The Ecology Center nestled in the serene landscape of San Juan Capistrano, California continues its renowned Community Table dinner series for the summer 2024 season, taking place every Friday, now through August. Guests are invited to indulge in an unforgettable dining experience under the stars where the dialogue between farm, chef and community comes alive on the plate. Each dinner showcases the vibrant seasonal produce from the center’s sustainable farm, transforming it into memorable conversations. Inspired by the season's bounty, each chef composes an eco-conscious menu that harmonizes with the vibrant palette of fruits, vegetables, herbs and berries grown and cultivated on the farm.”
“With an intimate setting for 80 guests per dinner, these gatherings promise an authentic farm-to-table experience. The evening unfolds with a convivial happy hour in the picturesque courtyard, followed by an enlightening farm tour where guests can pluck seasonal produce straight from the vine. Culminating in a sumptuous multicourse meal, meticulously crafted by the region's culinary luminaries, each dish promises to be a testament to its unique culinary vision, ensuring an unforgettable dining experience for all.”
“Tickets for each dinner are priced at $160-$175 per person, offering a fixed course, family-style menu that captures the essence of the season. Dinners commence at 6 p.m. and conclude at 10 p.m. To reserve a seat at the table and explore the lineup of participating chefs, please visit, TheEcologyCenter.org/Community-Table.”
The Ecology Centers Director of Impact & Partnerships, Jonathan Zaidman, continues with us sharing the bountiful harvest of the Community Table dinner series.
- Hi, I'm food and entertainment journalist Al Mancini, the creator of the weekly food and loathing podcast, an irreverent journey behind the scenes of the dynamic Las Vegas restaurant and bar scene. And when I want the best food intel for Southern California, I listen to the SoCal restaurant show on AM830 KLAA radio. - And welcome back, it is The SoCal restaurant show, and we're here with you every Saturday morning from 10 a.m. until 12 noon, right here on AM830 KLAA, the home of Angels Baseball 2024, and you can also catch us on the AM830 KLAA Angels app. I'm Andy Harris, the executive producer and co-host of the show, and we're proudly presented each and every week by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Prime Meats. We are venturing back to the Ecology Center in San Juan, Capistrano, that for those of you that are not familiar with it, is a nonprofit 28 acre organic certified farm that really is on a mission to, I think, enlighten a lot of us and also does a great job. But in addition to that, you can get some wonderful produce grown on the farm at their farm store. And it is a pleasure to welcome back their director of impact and partnerships, Jonathan Ziedman. Jonathan, just to peak our audience's curiosity a little bit, what are some of the highlights from the farm right now that are available in the farm store? - Well, we're coming right out of the spring and jumping into summer. So we have all sorts of great things. I'm very excited about the tomatoes. I like to and inspire to eat a seasonal diet as possible. So when the tomatoes come online, I get very excited. So anything having to do with tomatoes, summer squash, cucumbers is my favorite to pick up right now. - Sounds great. And also some ingredients there for pizza, which we'll get into in a minute. Jonathan, I think for our listening audience because it's foodies, the best introduction to the ecology center is attending one of the summer, Friday evening, community table dinners. We've talked about that it's all fresco. We've talked about that your capacity is 80 guests. Let's run through, if we will, what a typical evening would be. Because again, this is just a very special experience that you really can't get everywhere. And there is something comparable to this nationally called Outstanding in the Field, which also is a nonprofit. But when Outstanding in the Field comes through Southern California, let me assure my listeners that the ticket price on that is pretty heavy. And for what you get at the ecology center, for that experience, this multi-course feast, it is a lot more reasonable. So Jonathan, take it away if you would. - Well, we've been doing community table dinners for really 15 years from the start of the organization. And it's only a few years now that we've done them consistently every week. So from March until November or so, we have a different chef every week coming from Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, the Inland Empire, sometimes from a little further out. And they get to participate in this very interesting design challenge, which is that we tell them what's available, what's coming off of the farm, and they create a menu. We'll supplement it with some local seafood and local dairy, but nothing really coming from more than 50 miles away. We start the evening off with a beautiful happy hour in our courtyard. Everything is surrounded by, we've landscaped and we've really designed this ecological oasis at the ecology center, if I can say so myself. So you have a beautiful surrounding and you're having wine or beer or non-alcoholic beverage. We then walk through the farm. I think it's always important to build some context. It's where our food comes from, if we can actually see it, smell it, taste it, even better, and we loop out into our outdoor dining room. As you mentioned, we have 80 guests every week. Everything is sourced from the farm. Everything is scratch made and everything is cooked on fire in front of you. So it becomes a much more of an experience than just a meal. I like to say, we designed the community table to be the antithesis of what most of our culinary experiences look like in the modern age, which is that maybe we're sitting down and we don't know where our food came from and even who prepared it or why, what kind of cultural relationship they had to the recipes. And we certainly don't know the people around us. So we designed the exact opposite. Where our food comes from, who prepared it, why and how, and then you get to sit at a table with a few new friends. That's the community table. They're beautiful, fun, interesting. I am always fascinated by the fact that week over week, although throughout the season, the ingredients are mostly the same. Every single menu is completely different. - And as you mentioned, Jonathan, you meet some really interesting people. As we say here frequently on the SoCal restaurant show, food brings people together, and that's a truism. - It always has, Andy, and it's really only quite recently that we've become a little bit more insular. The hope here is that by breaking bread and by sharing wine, we actually begin to connect with one another a little bit more and hopefully solve some of these problems around it. - Works for me, Jonathan. Now, what is the ticket price and how do people get tickets and where can they find the upcoming schedule? Because you really have some wonderful chefs that pass through the community table. - Yes, you can see every week's chef and the corresponding date for them at the ecologycenter.org, it's our name.org. Tickets for members of the Ecology Center are $160 per person. For non-members, it's 175. That's all inclusive, that is beverage, that is meal, that's the new friends that you're gonna make as well as gratuity, so it's out the door. - And again, a little tip to our listeners. Join because you get then the ticket $160 and you support a very worthy cause in a meaningful way. Jonathan, let's further tease our audience because you have some really important chefs that are coming in in the next couple of weeks. For anybody that knows anything about Baja, California, we certainly know about the Rancho La Perta Resort. You have the chef coming in from there. Tell us a little bit about that evening and when it is. - So that's next Friday, coming up here. That dinner is unfortunately sold out as most of the dinners that we do host are sold out or do sell out. But Raina Venegas is definitely a name worth knowing or worth remembering. She is a phenomenal chef. She at Rancho La Perta down in Tecate, not just cooks, but also teaches how to cook with local, fresh, seasonal, organic ingredients. She is also partnered with her husband Marcello on the restaurant in Tecate called Justor Antamores. And they actually just got a Michelin star recognition as Michelin has grown into Mexico over these past few weeks for her hospitality. So she's a phenomenal human and a great chef. She will be at the farm this Friday. - Terrific. Now, is the Thinka dinner coming up on July 5th available? - It is. That one has some openings. And Joe, chef Joe Bauer is also a phenomenal chef. He is partnered on a few different restaurants, one of which has its own little market garden. So he's very familiar with learning how to source his meals from what's coming out of the field that very day. Now, as I teased earlier, the restaurant scene in San Juan, Capistrano is growing. The Acme Hospitality Group, which is known for some wonderful restaurants, excuse me, that are up in the Santa Barbara area. They are soon to open Lava Cara and the chef at Lava Cara in July will be coming to the community table at the Ecology Center. Tell us a little bit more about Chef Aaron Zimmer and what's gonna be happening that night because that portends to be a wonderful evening. - Chef Aaron Zimmer and his team will be joining us on July 19th and there is still availability for that dinner as well. For those, as you mentioned, who've had the pleasure to participate in any of Acme's restaurants, they do a very nice job and they're really upping up their game with what they have in stock for Lava Cara. So down the street from us on River Street in downtown San Juan, Capistrano by the Mission and the Adobe's Chef Aaron and his team are building a beautiful Spanish, Mesoamerican, Western style, live fire oriented restaurant that really encapsulates a lot of the same values that the Ecology Center does. He's one of the chefs that's opening up down the street from us but very excited about having a regenerative organic farm a mile away. So he's already sourcing from our farm as he trials and tests some of his recipe items and visiting us and coming to his dinner on the 19th will be a great way to see what he has in stock for Lava Cara. - Jonathan, definitely something exciting that's on the horizon and we will be talking more about Lava Cara in the coming weeks once they're actually up and operating and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Chef Aaron is a future guest on the show. Now, in addition to the community table dinner series you have an onsite restaurant and at certain times you do pizza. Tell us more about that Jonathan because I'm not really aware of all the details. - So we have our own restaurant as you mentioned it's called Camp Latino Cafe. We do breakfast and lunch from Wednesday through Sunday from nine to three and Camp Latino really wanted to be a lot of the same expression and experience as the community table and that everything is sourced from the highest possible quality ingredients from 50 to 500 feet away but it's the counterbalance in that it's a more accessible price point. You can bring your children, you can get in and out. So Camp Latino has soups and salads and sandwiches and like I said they're sourced better than any award-winning restaurant in Southern California. In addition to Camp Latino we also do pop-ups on Thursday nights so every other Thursday night at the farm we will rotate. Either piece pizza or tie-dye-tock area. Piece pizza is our wild fermented sourdough pizzas with our farm ingredients as well as salads and a roasted veg side so it's kind of an oligarch situation and the tie-dye-tock area is our blue corn masa from our farm and made tortillas with either local rockfish or veggie tacos as well as against salads or our heirloom farm grown beans and farm beverages as well. So every Thursday night whether you know if it's a pizza night or a taco night, show up at the ecology center and you'll have a great meal. - Jonathan, isn't it an American not to love pizza and tacos, come on. - It's our two favorite things. - Yeah, I say I wouldn't disagree. Jonathan, the one thing we haven't actually discussed is we're exactly in San Juan, Capostrano, is the ecology center and people are always concerned about parking, what's the parking situation at the ecology center? - Yeah, we're fairly close to the train station about a mile away, southwest of the train. We're on Ollipod Street and Camino de la Villone. We have plenty of parking. I recommend to people you can drive straight to the farm. You can take the train up from San Diego or down from LA. There's a free shuttle at the city of San Juan, Capistrano offers that stops at the ecology center. You can find that information on the city's website. There's a lot of ways to get to the farm and it's always simple. - And the website for the ecology center that has all of this information and lots more. - The website is theecologycenter.org, has all the information you mentioned. We're also very active on social media, mostly on Instagram at the ecology center. We list all of our events, experiences, dinners, cafe offerings and special programs. - Ladies and gentlemen, it is the ecology center in San Juan, Capistrano. The community table dinner series continues on Friday evenings through the summer. Really a very special experience in Orange County and Los Angeles. Jonathan, thanks for the time. You are listening to the SoCal restaurant show. When we return, we are up in Paso Robles. It is the French connection with Benham Wines. We're proudly presented by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Prime Meats will be back in a flash.
