By David Rogers. January 31, 2012. BLOWING ROCK – Firing an opening salvo for the newcomers to Blowing Rock’s 2012 Fire on the Rock competition dining event, Crave’s Jessica Grogan knocked off 2011 Champion Michael Barbato (Timberlake’s, Chetola Mountain Resort) Tuesday night, at Crippens Restaurant in Blowing Rock. Photos by Amanda Fife Lugenbell

With an unusual “secret ingredient” of Stokes Purple Sweet Potatoes supplied by Saura Pride® Sweet Potatoes, the food preparation adversaries and their respective teams worked quickly to select proteins, engineer menus, and design their presentations – even before the cooking actually began.

"It Was Intimidating"

In upsetting Barbato, Grogan overcame “first time” jitters and the intimidation factor.  “The event was a little different than we expected,” Grogan admitted to Blowing Rock News afterwards. “The plating took longer than we had planned. We didn't initially think of using an assembly line, and I was really nervous that we were not doing well because the food might come out cold.

“And then you have to think about the fact that Michael is a veteran of Fire on the Rock,” she continued. “So we were a little bit nervous about that, too. He has had six years with the competition format, the scoring, and he knows this kitchen.  And when you think about him being last year's champion, well that’s pretty intimidating. He seemed very comfortable back there, while I was at times scrambling around, looking for things.

“But , you know,”Grogan said, “Michael was a very good competitor, very nice and friendly. He and his team helped us out when we needed it.  It is a very small kitchen, so sharing space can be a challenge. Everyone was really good about that.”

Making It Times Two

What Grogan’s team lacked in logistics, they made up for in the food they plated. 

Before every competition, event host Jimmy Crippen reminds the chef contestants that “…one dish can make you or break you.”   On Tuesday, Grogan “wowed” the public diners and professional judges alike with the top two dishes of the evening.  The public voters gave Grogan’s “Sweet Potato Chocolate Torte” the #1 rating with 82.1% of possible votes, and made the Crave chef’s “Braised Pork Belly” the #2 dish with 79.3% of possible votes.

The professionals flip-flopped those rankings, making the Pork Belly #1 (81.7%) and the Chocolate Torte #2 (76.7%).

The six-course menu enjoyed by Tuesday night's 70 patrons included:

• 1st Course (Barbato) -- Grilled Shrimp, with ravioli of goat cheese, basil, purple sweet potato and vegetable slaw and red pepper sauce
• 2nd Course (Grogan) -- Braised Pork Belly, with purple sweet potato maple syrup, apple bacon, and three-potato hash
• 3rd Course (Grogan) -- Seared Leg of Lamb, with purple sweet potato polenta cake, cherry sweet potato demi, grilled asparagus, and fried purple sweet potatoes
• 4th Course (Barbato) -- Pork Tenderloin, with sweet potato bacon hash, rosemary infused demi
• 5th Course (Barbato) -- Purple Sweet Bread Pudding, with chocolate coconut cream, sweet potato, marshmallow, dried cranberry ice cream, and coconut cream
• 6th Course (Grogan) -- Sweet Potato Chocolate Torte, with salted rum caramel, purple sweet potato gelato

Interestingly, while the scores for the dishes covered a fairly narrow range, the public and professional judges had very different placings. 

A Lifetime in the Restaurant Business

While Grogan is new to the Fire on the Rock competition, she grew up in the restaurant industry beside her mother, Marla, who operated Banner Elk’s popular eatery, The Corner Palate.

Jessica started at the restaurant when she was 10.  “Fifteen years of my life were spent at The Corner Palate, and I did every position, starting with hosting and sushi rolling.  Everything I know about food preparation,” Grogan disclosed to Blowing Rock News, “I learned by my mother’s side.”

Grogan shared that besides her mother, mentors include watching a lot of the culinary shows on television. “I like Top Chef, Thomas Keller, and Iron Chef. I get ideas for dishes, as well as for technique.”

Blowing Rock’s latest culinary ingénue admitted that she didn’t quite know what to think of the secret ingredient, Stokes Purple Sweet Potatoes. “It’s my first year and I really had to decide whether to make them the course focus or an accompaniment.  It threw me off for a second, but eventually I was excited because it was purple – which is my absolute favorite color!"  (Blowing Rock News quickly ascertained that she did NOT attend Western Carolina University).

The Crave chef’s path to victory was not without rocky moments.  When Blowing Rock News pointed out that her second dish, featuring seared Leg of Lamb was marked down at least at a few tables because it came out cold, Grogan said, “We were not use to the kitchen, and we had to go back-to-back (the lamb dish immediately following her pork belly act), and we didn’t quite know how that worked.” In short, she admitted to not dealing with the challenges of the small kitchen and having to work simultaneously with and around the other team.  “I was pretty stressed out because I knew that it was not hot enough.”

Another challenge for the evening’s winner was running out of sauce at one point. “On the pork dish, I ran out of sauce.  We thought we had more than enough, so we put some extra on many of the plates.  Then all of a sudden from around the corner where we couldn’t see came this other bunch of plates we had to fill. We had to improvise for about six plates. It was not what we wanted to do, but it is what we had to do, rather than send the meal out incomplete. I had to make some sauce right then and there.”

Looking forward to the next round, which will be vs. the February 21^st winner between Glidewell’s Guy Thomas and The Table at Crestwood’s Matt Barlow, Grogan said the biggest lesson she will take to the quarterfinals is the plating. “You really need to have a very good assembly line for plating the food,” she said. “We had that at the end of this evening, but not at the beginning.  You are having to plate 60, 70, 80, even 100 plates within minutes.  You have to have an assembly line.  Initially, we were not prepared for that.”

Professional Judges Disagree, Too

Professional judge John Batchelor, a restaurant reviewer for the Greensboro News & Record and Winston-Salem Journal, was the founding judge for the event and the designer of the original scoring system.  He noted, “I always find this event fascinating. I am impressed by how well the chef teams are able to conceive and put together three dishes in such a short period of time.

“I am not a dessert guy,” Batchelor continued in talking about his favorites of the meal, “but that last dish (the chocolate torte, by Grogan) was fabulous. Prior to that, I liked the first course, the Grilled Shrimp (Barbato) and the sauce that accompanied the Leg of Lamb (Grogan).  That was a knockout.  In fact, I was really impressed with all of the sauces.  They made all of these dishes special.”

Noting the wide variance in opinions among the diners seated at the table with Blowing Rock News, Batchelor observed, “That’s not unusual, even among the professional judges.  You do get different reactions, if for no other reason than the fact that different people like different things. We designed the scoring system with that in mind. If you only judged by simply saying you liked this dish better than that one, without the subtleties of assigning a numerical value to the different criteria, we may very well have had different results. This system gives people an opportunity to react differently, and in detail.

“When the food comes to the table,” Batchelor concluded, “can have a large bearing on the scoring. I am thinking especially about aroma.  If your dish comes out from the kitchen to you as one of the first tables, when it is still quite hot, you are going to experience more aroma (and probably score it higher).  Desserts inherently have less aroma, so whether you get it first or last will be less of a factor.”

Graceful in Being Dethroned

“It was a good night,” declared Barbato of the Fire on the Rock’s opening event of the preliminary rounds. “Jessica did an awesome job…It was a great secret ingredient. It gave us an opportunity to incorporate different proteins and different foods. I’m happy with what I did, and I’m sure Jessica is happy with what she did.

“If I had to do it over again,” the Timberlake’s executive chef confessed, “I would probably do exactly the same thing. It’s like I told my team, you kind of roll the dice when you do this.  You construct a menu and prepare the food a certain way, and hope that you hit that certain special niche with the diners…You have 60 or 70 bodies out here and you are trying to hit the right note with each one.  Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t."

Looking back at last year’s competition, Crippen observed, “With Jessica winning tonight, we get to continue our theme of ‘Girls Rule, Boys Drool’. She had a whole team of ‘girls’ back there with her mom and aunt helping out. Their food was phenomenal.

“The fact that they knocked out the top-ranked guy is a bit of a surprise,” Crippen noted.  “You match last year’s champ against one of the newcomers, and the newbie knocks him out in the first round, that is very impressive.”

Crippen reminded Blowing Rock News that Grogan and Barbato were the first competing chefs to work out of what he calls “the food truck,” one of the changes to this year’s Fire on the Rock format which will keep it consistent with the other three events in the expanded series this year, including Fire on the Docks (Wilmington), Fire in the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill), and Fire in the Triad (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point.

Other differences in the event include digital scoring.  "Everyone is invited to bring their own smartphone, iPhone, iPod or tablet PC with WiFi capability.  They get to vote right on those devices, which saves us bundles of time."

Fire on the Rock continues Wednesday night, with the Green Park Inn's James Welch being challenged by Nate Curtis of Rowland's at Westglow Resort & Spa.  Crippens informed Blowing Rock News that he expects as many as 110 diners for that round.

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