The Wild Honey Pie started when Eric Weiner transformed his food blog into a new music website, and has only grown from there. It produces music videos and even has its own festival, Welcome Campers, every Memorial Day Weekend. It now does a monthly Brooklyn dinner party + music, which came on Wednesday, June 13th, to Le Fanfare with Plastic Picnic.
The actual dinner party was a three-course vegetarian meal, along with unlimited Sixpoint Alpenflo [which is what your correspondent cared most about…]. There were even separate dishes made for those with allergies. Admittedly, it’s not super-fancy ton of food, just salad, pasta, and chocolate mousse, but for fifty dollars a head, one gets a full evening. The pesto pasta was particularly good, and one could have as much as one wanted. While the mousse came in rather simple clear plastic cups, it was strong – one attendee said it reminded her of her old French boyfriend, how she barely spoke French, he barely spoke English, but both spoke “mediocre Spanish.”
It was notable that the crowd was probably more than half female, with a great number of couples. The event definitely does depend on whom you end up sitting with, as at Le Fanfare there were two long tables, some booths, and some two-person tables. The crowd did lean hipster (Brooklyn + vegetarian + new music is going to do that), but a little more mature than a club show (definitely some Park Slope parents who had a babysitter). Your correspondent actually ended up sitting with Weiner’s parents & sister, who were naturally effusive in their praise for the evening [and your correspondent didn’t feel like the oldest person there…]. But there were also people from the music and food industries, such as New York Public Radio and Brooklyn Vegetarian [no, not Brooklyn Vegan…].
The musical guest, after the dinner, was Plastic Picnic, a local Brooklyn act (made of Pacific Northwest transplants, because no one’s actually from New York…). One of the points of the dinner parties, and The Wild Honey Pie in general, is to showcase new music, and Plastic Picnic were a good pick for the event. They had airy music played seated, which worked post-dinner to a seated, quiet crowd. The band even noted how much nicer of an experience this was for them, of people listening, compared to drunks at the back of a club.
The next Wild Honey Pie dinner party is at Esme with Zuli on July 16th. After that, it expands to that mysterious borough of Manhattan in August, with plans for a Los Angeles edition.
-photos by Sara Laufer courtesy of The Wild Honey Pie
