Dream Team

When the sum is greater than the parts

I knew we needed that chokecherry cake.

A couple months ago, I asked my friend Alan Bergo if he’d help me with a major catering gig I was doing for the Minnesota Land Trust. Eighteen people, tasting menu, and they wanted it to be very Minnesota. I could think of no one better to be my right hand for this than Alan. I was stoked when he said yes.

Life got busy, so for a long time the only thing I knew I wanted on the menu was his signature dessert: a cake made with finely ground, dried chokecherries — pit and all. It’d be a perfect capper we could work backwards from.

When I design tasting menus, I start from dessert and work backwards; a trick I learned from Chef Paul Bertolli of California. Doing this helps you create flavors in the beginning courses that are echoed by the dessert — and, importantly, it forces you to portion the savory courses so your diners still have room for it. I have seen too many extravagant menus where the diners all feel like bloated whales by the time the desserts get their star turn. I have vowed never to do that.

As I started to work on the menu, I quickly realized: Why on earth should I make this menu alone? Alan is a star in his own right, so why not make it a true collab? We met at my local bar, Centro in Highland Park, for a drink and to brainstorm.

Alan was a little hesitant at first. I get it. I’d absolutely work for free to help him execute his menu, and that’s what he thought he was walking into. Then I told him that a) I’d share our payout with him, and b) I really wanted this to be an “us” dinner not a “me” dinner. His eyes lit up and the magic began.

I can only imagine what the people sitting next to us were thinking. “I have these patience dock leaves that are so cool! We should use them to wrap something.” I was thinking, maybe a carrot consomme? With wild greens? We have elk to play with. “Lets make a porcini jus!”

Within minutes, we were building dishes neither of us would have invented alone.

Back and forth we traded ideas, discussed flavors and colors and textures and temperatures, what we could easily execute in someone else’s kitchen — the event was at a nice house on Lake Harriet in Minneapolis — what might be too weird, what would delight our guests, and on and on.

Alan and I have been friends for a decade at least, maybe more. We’ve both lived in St. Paul for three years. And yet somehow this was the first time we’d done a dinner together. The closest was a joint book event in 2021, but I was still living in California at the time, so Alan did all the food for that.

As we got closer to the event, it was clear that this was not only going to be good, it was going to be easy. We each have absolute trust in the other’s skill, judgment and taste. We needed only cursory text check-ins in the days leading up to the dinner.

Even a horrendous thunderstorm the night before the event didn’t really stop us. I lost power around 3 a.m., and the storm was fierce enough that the power company said they couldn’t get us back online until that night. But Alan’s power was fine, so I schlepped everything to his place to do my final prep, making tarragon dumplings for the carrot soup.

Without even being asked, Alan started picking perfect lambsquarters leaves for the soup’s garnish. As I moved through his kitchen for the first time, everything was where it should be — chef mind-meld in full effect — and we worked calmly and cleanly, nerding out on obscure food plants, recipes from Norway to North Dakota to Naples, life as a cookbook author, life in general.

When we arrived at the location for the event, we unpacked, set up, and started prep with few words exchanged, and no orders. We just… knew what to do. Alan had even printed out menus for everyone:

Appetizers

Local cheeses, deer summer sausage, wild boar salami, smoked sausage in a turkey’s neck, Lake Superior lake trout dip, homemade German rye, porcini conserva, pickled sunchokes, fermented green beans, Russian brined cherry tomatoes

Soup

Carrot consomme with tarragon dumplings and lambsquarters

Fish

Wild rice-dredged local panfish and Red River catfish with dock-and-sorrel chiffonade and lovage sauce

Main

Porcini dusted, seared elk loin with porcini jus, local asparagus with ramp oil, wild rice pilaf with black walnuts, porcini, black walnut oil, porcini vinegar, nodding onions, and pickled rhubarb

Cheese

Tiny preserved red pine cones in syrup, goat cheese and dock seed crackers

Dessert

Chokecherry cake with aronia frosting and sweet clover whipped cream

We designed the menu so we’d trade off courses, allowing us to talk with the guests while the other did final work and plating on the following course. Needless to say, we were both in full geek mode, flinging around Latin names and talking about butchering deer and bleeding fish and how to take the astringency out of pine cones.

Everything came off without a hitch, and we were pretty sure everyone liked the food. After all, people lie. Plates don’t.

A few days afterwards, Alan and I were exchanging weird plants to grow in our collective yards, which — shocker — are pretty similar, when I wondered out loud why it took us so long? “Life,” he said.

He’s right, of course. But it’s still no excuse.

Alan and I have lived just a few miles apart for several years. We’ve been friends and have respected each other’s work for more than a decade. Our tastes, technique and love of odd, wild ingredients mesh almost perfectly. The opportunity had been sitting there the entire time, waiting for one of us to make a phone call.

The strange thing isn’t that our dinner worked so well. It’s that it took so long to happen. I suspect all of us have some version of that collaboration waiting in the shadows: a friendship, a partnership, a project, a hunting or fishing partner, a business idea, maybe even a date. Some thing that could emerge as more than the sum of its parts — if only someone made the first move.

Out in nature, diversity is strength. Healthy ecosystems aren’t built from one or two species doing everything well. They’re built from relationships. Maybe that’s true for us, too.

Most of the best things I’ve done in life have involved another person bringing something to the table that I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been the reporter I was without my editors. Hunter Angler Gardener Cook wouldn’t be what it is without my ex Holly’s photography.

This dinner was a reminder of that.

It was also a reminder that sometimes the difference between a good idea and a great one is simply deciding to do it together. Sometimes that takes time.