Our Spring Menu: A Collaborative Effort
The Spring Menu: On Full Display At Our Collaboration Dinner
On Wednesday March 27th we hosted our Collaboration Dinner at Langosta Lounge. It was en evening of wine, food, and friendship and I am so grateful to everyone who came to support the restaurant as we finish the curation of our spring menu.
What Is A Collaboration Dinner?
The Collaboration Dinner is an opportunity for my team and I to showcase the items that we hope to place on our spring menu. We always hope to garner fresh perspectives and honest feedback so that we can tweak and improve the dishes before they hit the tables in the busy season. It’s a simply awesome chance to let locals, family, and friends know what’s new with my work, my team, and our community outreach. It’s also a great chance to allow the people we know and love to connect with new people as well.
Big Things Coming This Spring!
This time around there was so much to share with our Collaboration Dinner attendees. Our Kula Farm and Kula Café efforts are growing and the farm will be catapulting into spring with the same joy and community-minded action it always offers. My new Moringa supplement line, Wave of Balance is launching (Our party favor gifts at the dinner featured a sample size of each supplement and you can learn more here) and I’m so excited to bring the tree of life to the community that fuels my life. The featured meals that evening featured mushrooms from Two River Gourmet Mushroom company. My new cookbook Feed This Community was on display and available for purchase at the dinner and, if you missed it, you can grab your copy here. I also had a chance to mention our Food For Thought By The Sea food truck and the Vehicle For Change Initiative to fundraise for the truck (To learn more about that click here )
With so much going on this season from mushrooms to food trucks, to cookbooks, we took time to pause, exhale, and enjoy the company of some fantastic people while tasting some new menu items.
What’s For Dinner
One of the first plates of the evening was a Laissez Crab which included Creole spiced warm jumbo lump crab meat, delicately diced jalapenos, spicy creole mustard, and house sourdough crostini for dipping. The cheese was one I learned to make with my husband Scott at Bobolink Dairy Farm in Pennsylvania. We took with a renowned cheese maker named Nina White.
You can never have enough appetizers and so we also offered our guests some carefully cared-for Cuban olives. The olives were chopped with garlic, mixed with ricotta, and covered in panko. The soft, sweet, crunchy, lovely little bites make an awesome accompaniment to the rest of your meal.
One of the evening’s salads was what we affectionately call our Carousel Salad because it changes seasonally. The salad featured items grown right here in Asbury Park at our Kula Farm. The farm serves Kula café and other local restaurants who desire locally grown, organic vegetables and Lisa has taken the farm on like a dragon, as I said that evening. We’ll be hosting a Farm Dinner in April, so be on the look out for that!
Another salad that evening is what we call our Umami Salad. This offering featured a marinated Two River organic mushroom and broccolini salad with pickled grapes, miso Chinese mustard dressing, brûlée-ed burrata, and crispy noodles. Umami in itself is a full experience and this salad certainly follows suit.
One of the items we showcased that evening was a lobster pizza with corn and bacon.
We think those two words, lobster and pizza, just belong together. Be sure to try them and let us know if you agree!
An Entire Menu of New Tastes And New Connections
Our dinner entrees featured an Asian Chicken Marsala with spiced sake demi-glace, snow peas, a pepper sauté, and our very own Two River organic mushrooms. This unique take on Marsala featured a sweet but delectable sauce and aromatic mushrooms that glide on your palate and warms your heart as it does.
A fan favorite that evening was our Ravino Lemon Mascarpone Ravioli. The local summer squash, heirloom tomato, carefully charred Vidalia onion, farm fresh thyme, black garlic rose velouté, and pine nut gremolata topping gave our guests the chance to experience an absolute adventure in Italian tastes.
Jalisco Steak made an appearance as well. This divine grilled and marinated skirt steak features caramelized onions, lobster potato cake, and corn equites. Juicy, cooked to perfection and expertly seasoned, this is sure to be a dish that you come back for.
If you’ve never tried Buffalo Cauliflower, I’d suggest you stop by Langosta this spring. Ours features Mazi buffalo sauce with cambozola blue cheese drizzle and Kula’s own micro celery is definitely worth the trip if you’re looking to spice things up.
Our collaboration dinner also featured General Tso Chicken with farro, Two River organic mushrooms, bok choy, and a flavorful broccolini sauté. So, if you’re looking for an excuse to put down that take out menu, come see us instead.
Surf and Turf, met Farm to Sea on Wednesday. Our dish features white miso and cilantro marinade, coconut, chili, ginger broth, carrot, and radish slaw, with lemongrass jasmine rice and fish sauce vinaigrette. This is a perfect dish for when you’re at Langosta on the boardwalk with a view of the crashing waves and the sound of the roaring ocean. You might even enjoy your Farm to Sea with your favorite wine as well.
Speaking of Wine…
One of the toughest parts of curating a seasonal menu is the wine list. Tasting wine is a tough job and not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. There are thousands of wines from around the world that could be featured in our list and so we’ve taken to including our staff in wine research and including our Collaboration Dinner guests in the pairing down of that well-researched list.
Among some of the most notable wines of the evening were those from Sophie Bertin (Her wine label features a fossil from the place where the grapes in the wine are grown.) and Rumson Red from my very own Community Vines (A community-serving collaboration with the incomparable James Foley of SÉAMUS Wines and Shore Point Distributors. Click here to learn more ). Needless to say, we are grateful for the help in tasting and exploring each of the wines and we can’t wait to share our wine list with you all!
Langosta In Spring Time
Whether you’re having a drink with a friend or a family dinner to celebrate a milestone the team and I at Langosta are excited to welcome you and all of our visitors this spring.
Connect With Us!
To stay in the loop with all that’s going on for us this season be sure to stay tuned to our website and blog and don’t forget to stop by and try our Spring menu!
See you soon!
Wave of Balance
You can choose to feel more balanced in your energy, focus, and mood each day.I know, because I had a dinner in Nicaragua once. And that dinner and it changed my life.
Snow in March and Dinner In Nicaragua
I woke up this morning thinking about balance. I found myself thinking about how much I will appreciate warm summer days after icy and bitingly-cold ones like today. There's a certain joy that comes when the weather breaks because a cycle is ending, another is beginning, and new joys are coming. Even as I sit here with snow coming down in March, I couldn’t be more excited for the spring. There’s an electricity in me that can’t wait to share something awesome with you!
The “Not So Well” Wellness Cycle
I guess I should see if you’re going to be as excited as I am, right? Only seems fair. So, let me ask you: Have you ever wished to be calmer? Less stressed? Have you ever wished to feel more energized or more focused?
If you’re anything like me, you have. And maybe you tried things like caffeine or energy drinks. Maybe you got into the cycle of taking something to help you sleep and in the morning something to wake you up and get your energy or mood in check.
Maybe this cycle works for a few weeks but then you skip a coffee, get a migraine, spend an unproductive afternoon on the couch, and try again the next day.
Or maybe you’re a Rockstar at keeping this cycle. You grab a coffee on your way to work, pop a melatonin in the evening and repeat the next day. Sure, you could keep this going, but it’s not got you feeling all that healthy. You just don’t feel like it’s adding to your wellness routine at all.
You may find yourself in a “keep it going” cycle. The thing about that cycle is that it’s often giving you a sort of “take A for this symptom and B for this symptom” approach. It’s not giving you what we need to have healthy and sustainable mood, energy, and focus. It doesn’t have you feeling balanced. It doesn’t have you riding the waves of life and it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.
You can choose to feel more balanced in your energy, focus, and mood each day.
I know, because I had a dinner in Nicaragua once. And that dinner and it changed my life.
About That Dinner In Nicaragua
So, I found myself at dinner in Nicaragua one evening discussing food, of course, with some friends ( To read more about this amazing trip click here).
I had been to an awesome little smoothie bar earlier that day and had grabbed myself something new to try. I asked my friends what they knew about the stuff they put in my smoothie. It was this “new-to-me” food called Moringa.
An Impromptu Moringa Lesson
I was expecting the usual “It’s the newest fad for the tourists,” or “It’s glorified kale,” . I was expecting something to let me know that I had fallen into a tourist trap of sorts. But what I found was my friends telling me about the superfood that landed in my smoothie. They mentioned how growing it gives work to the farming community. They described how it was full of antioxidants and loaded with nutrients.
At dinner I learned that Moringa helps battle malnutrition in other countries. It offers sustainable farming opportunities in Nicaragua. And it's also a daily tool for energy, focus, and mood elevation.
I learned that those who grow Moringa (and those who use it daily) call it the “Tree of Life”. It definitely earned that name. It’s this superfood tree that grows fast, is super leafy, resists drought and loves warm climates. So, Moringa is often a tool for addressing malnutrition in the developing world.
Moringa is full of bioactive plant compounds and current research explores Moringa's application to antibiotic and cancer treatment, its impact on blood pressure, its impact on immune response, and how it addresses blood sugar response.
Current research aside, there are some things I do know:
Moringa is overflowing with antioxidants, energy-boosting power, an ability to help with GI balance.
The Birth of Wave of Balance
That was enough to have this community-conscious chef excited, but it got even better. My friends knew a local Moringa farmer and I began to get the feeling that this was meant to be. I met with this farmer one afternoon in Nicaragua and also met a man by the name of Mr. Soon that day too. Mr. Soon and I hit it off so well that he and I began a business relationship. We were ready to bring Moringa back to our home countries.
It was then that I created Wave of Balance, a Moringa supplement company with a conscience.
When I first decided to bring Wave of Balance to my little corner of the world, I gave out samples to friends and loved ones. I thought I’d have to check in with them in a few months to see how they were doing. But what happened instead is that they began to tell me what was going on with them.
Some felt a little pep in their step and others said they were sleeping better. Some reported their skin felt smoother and others had made it through the winter without a bout of the flu. Moringa (with its antioxidants and nutrients) was helping them. It was addressing their greatest areas of imbalance. While that’s awesome for them, now it’s your turn.
Wave of Balance: Cutting Through The Noise On Your Way To Wellness
You have so many choices when it comes to your daily routine. And there can be a lot of noise out in the world telling you what you need to live a life full of wellness.
Wave of Balance is here to cut through that noise and offer you a simple way to care for your body every day.
