Art meets food for a dinner series at Hotel 1110
For years, Carmel photographer Kim Weston and a group of other local artists and a winemaker friend would get together each month to share new work and a meal with one another. The gathering rotated between their homes, and each time, the host provided dinner. Sometimes dinner was just pizza, and sometimes it was reheated Chinese takeout. When Weston’s home was the venue, he cooked.
Weston loves cooking and sees it as just another expression of being a visual artist. He began cooking as a kid, putting meals on the table for his siblings while his mother waitressed at Nepenthe. The grandson of photographer Edward Weston, he now loves to cook for large events at his home in Carmel. But for years, he’s wanted to recreate one of his home-cooked artists’ dinners in a restaurant, where he could share both his passion for food and for photography.
This fall, he’s gotten his wish—and that means you can experience one of his artists’ evenings, too.
Beginning this Wednesday, Aug. 22, Weston will begin cooking a series of four monthly dinners at Hotel 1110, the former Inn at Del Monte Beach.
Weston has already hung his latest work at the hotel, and on Sunday, he drove to Pezzini Farms in Castroville to buy baby artichoke for an artichoke frittata that he’ll make as part of the feast that he learned from the Sicilian grandfather of his wife, Gina Weston. Also on the menu: oysters, a marinated squid salad, calamari, stuffed calamari with Sicilian meatballs, basil-lemon sorbet and homemade limoncello.
While Weston insists he’s a cook and not a chef, and a self-taught cook at that, he’s done a lot of cooking alongside his good friend Michael Jones, the chef behind the Cachagua General Store and A Moveable Feast. And Weston is full of passion for putting on a great time for his guests.
“I love food, I love sharing and cooking for people,” Weston says. “To me, it’s about more than doing a dinner.”
Tickets are $75 per person, and each evening has a capacity of about two dozen guests. Future dates are Sept. 19, Oct. 31 and Nov. 14.
From time to time, Weston will invite other artists to join him in putting on the dinners. Right now, he’s working on bringing in the photographer, Roman Loranc.
For reservations, call Hotel 1110 at 831.655.0515.
About the author
SARAH WOOD—founding editor and publisher of Edible Monterey Bay—has had a life-long passion for food, cooking, people and our planet.
She planted her first organic garden and cared for her first chicken when she was in elementary school in a farming region of Upstate New York.
Wood spent the early part of her career based in Ottawa, Canada, working in international development and international education. After considering culinary school, she opted to pursue her loves for writing, learning about the world and helping make it a better place by obtaining a fellowship and an MA in Journalism from New York University.
While working for a daily newspaper in New Jersey, she wrote stories that helped farmers fend off development and won a state-wide public service award from the New Jersey Press Association for an investigative series of articles about a slumlord who had hoodwinked ratings agencies and investment banks into propping him up with some early commercial mortgage securitizations. The series led Wood to spend several years in financial journalism, most recently, as editor-in-chief of the leading magazine covering the U.S. hedge-fund industry.
Wood now lives with her family in Washington, DC, where she is a freelance writer and manages communications for Samaritan Ministry, an antipoverty and antiracist nonprofit that provides struggling Greater Washington residents with highly personalized and compassionate life counseling and coaching.
