As a music writer I’m used to being spoiled with free tickets to concerts, festivals and other events that I’d happily shell out my own money for. No event makes me feel more pampered, though, that Radio Milwaukee’s annual SoundBites fundraiser, a decadent, $125 ticket event at the Iron Horse Hotel featuring food from than a dozen of the city’s most esteemed chefs.
If you’ve been to a few tasting events before you know that they can sometimes be fairly frugal affairs, with restaurants seemingly sharing their cheapest dishes. There was nothing frugal about the selection at this year’s SoundBites, though, which featured chefs from institutions like Amilinda, Bavette, and the Pabst Theater Group building beautiful dishes around ingredients like mussels, leg of lamb, and duck confit. The chefs here come with something to prove.
The fundraiser’s high-concept hook is that each tasting station features not only a chef, but also a Radio Milwaukee DJ, staffer or friend of the station who has picked out a song, so it’s a food and music pairing. As a culinary experience, it's a little silly, to be honest—there aren’t taste receptors on the tongue that are somehow activated by sound—but as a social exercise it's wonderful. The setup allows guests to get some face time with voices they may only have heard on the radio. And since booze flowed generously at this event (guests were greeted with champagne before they even took off their coat), everybody was in a jovial, chatty mood. I enjoyed snacking on Story Hill BKC chef Joe Muench’s chimichurri-slathered smoked pork hand pie while chatting with “guest musicologist” Trapper Schoepp about his upcoming album, a roller-coaster-themed project that sounds pretty great.
And while music doesn’t enhance taste, it certainly can enhance mood. If many of the dishes were high-end, the music choices were refreshingly unpretentious. Tandem chef Caitlin Cullen’s spicy, arugula-adorned spin on shrimp and grits was accompanied by Marcus Doucette’s pick, “Soul Food” by Frankie Seay, a no-brainer pairing of soul food with soul food. A desert table from Parkside 23 simply paired sweet treats (chocolate eclairs and a fried bananas foster) with a sweet song (The Lemon Twigs’ “I Wanna Prove To You,” selected by Radio Milwaukee’s Makenzie Boettcher. And while I don’t know what Jordan Lee’s logic was pairing UGK’s “Int’l Players Anthem
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