Photo: Edible Education Experience via Facebook

Edible Education Experience, the nonprofit that operates the Emeril Lagasse Foundation Kitchen House & Culinary Garden in College Park, is celebrating its fifth anniversary with two special dinners, Sunday, April 10, and Monday, April 11.

Resident chef Kevin Fonzo will be joined by culinary compatriots from throughout the area to cook the dinners. Sunday’s dinner will feature Jason Wolfe of Tornatore’s; Michael Collantes, Soseki; Hari and Jenneffer Pulapaka, Global Cooking School; Jamie McFadden, Cuisiniers Catering; and Trina Gregory-Propst, Se7en Bites.

Monday will feature Wendy Lopez; Reyes Mezcalaria; Lordfer Lalicon, Kadence; Fabrizio Schenardi, Four Seasons; and Julie Petrakis, Ravenous Pig.

Tickets are $150 plus gratuity and you can purchase them online here for Sunday and here for Monday. Both dinners begin at 6 p.m.

The second Orlando Wine Festival & Auction, which was slapped together in just 45 days, raised nearly $750,000 for the Orlando Magic’s Youth Foundation, which serves at-risk kids in Central Florida. 

Laurent Branlard, the award-winning pastry chef, is leaving the Lake Nona Wave hotel just months after its opening to take the pastry chef position at the Fountainbleu Miami Beach.

Branlard is the only person to win the World Pastry Team Championship competition twice, in 2002 and again in 2008. He said Monday that he had been recruited by a headhunter to move to the fabled Miami hotel. He’ll be leaving Florida’s newest hotel for one of its older

Just last week, we reviewed Bacán, the signature restaurant at the Wave and singled out Branlard’s dessert as one of many hight points.

Prior to joining the Lake Nona Wave, Branlard had been at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort since 2002. When he announced in October that he was taking the position at the then not-yet-open Wave, he told me that one of the attractive points was that it was a boutique hotel with only 234 rooms. “We won’t have to mass feed and do mass banquets,” he said then.

Photo: The Pinery

Shortly after it opened last summer, The Pinery, the very good lakeview restaurant in the Ivanhoe Village district, had a chef change. Steven Mattix took over the role of executive chef following the departure of opening chef Naomi Freeman. (You can read my review here.)

Mattix moved to Central Florida from the D.C. area where he was a sous chef for Jose Andrés and also opened restaurants for [Jeff] Black’s Restaurant Group.

So far he has maintained most of the opening menu, though there may be some changes to come. I asked Mattix if he could share the recipe for the restaurant’s Shrimp & Grits with Cornbread for my monthly Local Flavor column with Community Paper, and he was more than happy to oblige.

You can find the recipe on the Community Paper’s website. Mattix suggests you make the cornbread, which is essential to the recipe, first so that it’s ready as soon as you’ve cooked the shrimp.

Give it a try.