All About The Oscars Dinner (Part One) 🏆 🎬
Ten films, ten courses, ten guests, two nights.
Food and film are my biggest passions in life, as of right now, so I host a lot of dinner parties and movie viewings. An Oscars dinner party, which I’ve now hosted for three years, is the natural combination of these two interests. I care about my dinner parties a lot… but I care about this one a bit more. The format is straightforward: there are ten Best Picture nominees each year, so there are ten courses. Each one is, ideally, thematically related to those movies. It’s one thing to come up with ideas as a thought exercise. It’s another thing entirely to ensure the menu is cohesive, feasible, and delicious. Oh, and there should be matching wine pairings. And cocktails/beer/spirits for each of the ten movies.
Not to pat myself on the back too much, but I did a heck of a job organizing and planning and budgeting this dinner. I think I spent 40-50 hours researching and planning and procuring. But I didn’t do this alone. My good friend Aaron graciously volunteered his time and his talents to help me execute my vision on both Saturday and Sunday. Without him shucking oysters and chopping chives and rolling dough, the dinner would have taken five hours. We got it done in a bit over three. (It could have been tighter… my target was two hours and thirty minutes, or the length of Anatomy of a Fall.)
Aaron also curated the wine pairings, and he found some great bottles at bargain prices. Given that most of the Best Picture nominees were period pieces, the wine menu hewed close to the Old World: France, Germany, Italy. In addition, my cousin Eric, with whom I have hosted many, many dinner parties, gave us a much needed burst of energy for the Sunday seating. He helped curate the cocktail menu, and for the second dinner he made drinks and washed dishes, which really took a load off of us.
But anyways. Here’s the full rundown for this year’s Oscars dinner: food, wine, and drinks. Maybe it’ll give you some last minute inspiration for your own Oscar party on Sunday. If anyone at the Academy is reading this, yes I would love to have a sponsorship collaboration.
(Sidenote: I intended to publish this on Tuesday or Wednesday, but didn’t have the time to write this until Thursday and Friday night. Nothing like a hard deadline — Oscars eve — to get one to write somewhat efficiently.)
Oysters and Caviar (Poor Things)
I know pastéis de nata would have been the obvious choice. I love that delectable Portuguese egg tart which, per Mark Ruffalo’s foppish cad (or is he a caddish fop?), should not be “eaten dainty flake by dainty flake, but inhaled with gusto, like life itself.” I did look into it, but wasn't confident enough in my pastry skills to pull it off.
So I went with the very next thing that Bella Baxter ate upon landing in Lisbon: freshly shucked oysters, paired with champagne.
I picked up four dozen blue point oysters from my favorite farmer’s market fishmonger on Saturday morning. Having texted them in advance, I showed up and had a big bag of bivalves ready to be taken home. “We gave you a few extra just in case any of them were bad,” the vendor informed me. When I got home, I counted them out… There were an extra dozen. And these oysters were so fresh — you could still smell the seawater clinging to them — that we only had one fallen soldier of the whole bunch. One fun discovery when scrubbing the oysters was the presence of some baby oysters, attached to the mature shells. Sadly, it was too late to rescue them and bring them back to the ocean where they could grow older (and edible).
To make things extra opulent, there was a follow-up course of caviar, which was layered on top of crème fraîche and potato chips, topped with chives. I don’t think caviar is explicitly shown in Poor Things, but the decadence fits. We all got to do a side by side of two varieties of caviar, both from Pearl Street Caviar (they basically do free, same-day deliveries in New York. Highly recommend them!) The Siberian Select has a stronger flavor than the Ossetra, which boasts a softer texture and more pleasing green hue. I had everyone guess which caviar was more expensive; most thought it was the Siberian Select, which was actually the cheaper option.
Wine pairing: Delacroix Blanc de Blancs. I admit I cheated and didn’t get legitimate champagne; it’s quite expensive. Instead I picked up a couple bottles of this sparkling wine that feels just as opulent at a quarter of the price of champagne. It’s my go-to these days when the occasion calls for bubbles. “This Chardonnay & Chenin blend is the perfect combination of velvety smooth bubbles, crisp, and perfect for the richness of oysters & caviar.” (All wine-related quotes throughout are from Aaron, who put these wine pairings together.)
Pastrami on Rye (Maestro)
Food is absolutely not the focal point of this Leonard Bernstein biopic, so I went with a historical linkage. Pastrami on rye, that staple of New York Jewish cuisine, has always been popular, and I’m almost certain that Lenny would have eaten many in his lifetime.
I wasn’t going to make pastrami from scratch. For one, I don’t have a smoker. For another, delis have been perfecting their recipes for decades and who am I to pretend I could make anything nearly as good? At the risk of doxxing myself, I live very, very close to the Katz’s Deli outpost in Downtown Brooklyn, so it was simply a matter of popping outside to buy a pound of meat before the dinner began. (I made the rye bread and dill pickles from scratch.) This was the simplest course to prepare: smear mustard on rye bread, layer pastrami on top, and cut into small tasting sized sandwiches, accompanied by a pickled cucumber.
Wine pairing: Riesling, Dr. Loosen - 2022. “Pastrami is tough to find a pairing for due to the heavy use of black pepper. But the fat content is our friend which primes for the balancing act of an acid and fruit forward riesling.”
Smoked Salmon and Potato Salad (Oppenheimer)
Admittedly, this is a rather obscure reference point. Albert Einstein mentions it towards the end of the film, rather offhand, a flourish of dialogue that is mostly there to ground the scene in specificity.
But beyond that offhand remark, J. Robert Oppenheimer was an influential Jewish man from New York (just like Leonard Bernstein). Smoked salmon (or lox) is just as iconic as pastrami in American Jewish cuisine, and Serious Eats had a recipe that was simple and able to be made in advance. A couple weeks before the dinner, I made the salad as a test, and immediately after my first bite, I had one thought: this needs salmon roe. So I dolloped a bunch of trout roe (also purchased from Pearl Street Caviar), and put some chives on top to add an extra herby hit.
This was meant to be more of a carby filler on this menu, but rather surprisingly, when I polled my guests on which course was their favorite, this was the winner. One friend of mine has an egg allergy, so he’s never been able to eat a potato salad (they almost always have mayonnaise). But this dish uses sour cream instead. The look on his face when I told him that yes, he can actually eat this potato salad… It's why I do this.
Wine pairing: Auxerrois, Manbach - 2022. An Alsatian white wine. “Rare find here, the full sibling of chardonnay and can be named Pinot Blanc. Rich in acid, minerality, and pleasant stone fruits make it the ideal pairing for any smoked salmon dish.”
Osage-Style Meat Pie (Killers of the Flower Moon)
No question I was going to spotlight Osage cuisine for the Killers of the Flower Moon course. Originally, I looked into making grape dumplings — it’s what is on the table in that infamous press still — but sourcing some of the ingredients was going to be a challenge, and it was too similar to another dessert that I had locked in for this menu.
So after doing some research (read: furious Googling), I came across meat pies. A longtime staple of Osage food, and something that Martin Scorsese had been served multiple times during production. Osage meat pies consist of ground beef and suet (raw, solid fat that is found around the kidneys), encased in a dough of flour and buttermilk. It can be hard to find recipes for Indigenous cuisine — from what I gather, natives are protective of their culinary culture, and it’s not like there’s a Native American vertical on Bon Appétit. Fortunately, YouTube was an incredible resource, as it often is for foods not typically cooked in American kitchens. I found a video that seemed the most comprehensive and followed it.
Securing some suet was much easier than I thought, thanks to a farmer’s market vendor offering it. Since it’s usually just thrown out, they sell it for just $1 a pound. With the leftover suet, I made some beef tallow, which I’ve been using any time I cook a potato.
After testing the recipe, I decided to add some paprika to the meat mix. Although it’s not at all traditional, it tasted a lot better, and seemed a milder alteration than adding onions or pico de gallo to the filling (that would have been delicious though). Working with the dough was pretty annoying, but the end result was tasty, with the suet rendering into a luscious fat that gave the meat pie a clean richness. (Shoot me a message if you’d like the recipe for the meat pies.)
Wine pairing: Chiroubles "La Grosse Pierre", Dom. de la Grosse Pierre - 2022. “Beaujolais makes Gamay which can be the lightest and easiest drinking wine, but Chiroubles is the appellation that grew up and went to college. This has a touch more spice and body than regular gamay, perfectly assisting the minimally spiced Osage meat pies.”
Boston Lettuce (American Fiction)
This was the hardest movie to link up with food. I also really needed some sort of vegetable/salad course. Eventually, I just went for the pun: the movie is set in Massachusetts, with a lot of scenes in Boston. Boston lettuce is a thing. (It’s more commonly known as butterhead lettuce.) In Six Seasons, the cookbook I use the most, there’s a recipe for butter lettuce salad with boiled potatoes, soft boiled eggs, and pancetta vinaigrette. It was a welcome breather between two beefy and fatty dishes, but also substantial enough to stand on its own as a proper dish and not merely a side salad.
Wine pairing: Château Graville-Lacoste, Graves - 2022. “Usually Bordeaux = Basic but this one was anything but that, tons of character on the nose and palate. It elevated every aspect of the salad course, typically we look for the balancing act, but this took it to higher heights.”
Chopped Cheese Tteokbokki Poutine (Past Lives)
This was what I was most excited to make. Nowon’s chopped cheese rice cakes is one of my favorite things to eat in New York, and it was a cross between the Korean and New York cultures of Past Lives. But Nora first emigrated to Canada before moving to New York… so to include something Canadian, I tossed in some cheese curds at the end to make it a poutine of sorts. And who would say no to extra cheese?
I feared having to attempt to re-create the dish on my own, but lucky for me, Nowon’s chef published the recipe as part of a video he shot for Vice. That had everything I needed. This is truly a restaurant recipe, where you spend a lot of time making various components so that when it’s time to actually serve the dish, it comes together in about five minutes1. Next time I make this, I’ll add some chili oil for color and flavor, but otherwise it’s perfect. Super rich.
Wine pairing: Barbera, Fratelli Arditi - 2021. “A true layup here, whenever I see a dish with meat & cheese in the driver seat, I think Barbera from Piedmont. The cousin of Barolo that dropped out of college and became a bartender, it has enough tannins to be serious but enough acid and fruit to be a crowd pleaser/palate cleanser.”
Well, I hit the email length limit, so this concludes in a separate post:
Big thanks to my friends who took some great photos of the Oscars dinner: Pearl, Wendy, and Giselle ensured I could share this dinner on this newsletter.
As a test run, I made this back in January as part of a Past Lives dinner & a movie party I co-hosted with a friend who lives in the East Village. That dinner also featured galbi, roasted sunchokes, and a radicchio salad with fish sauce vinaigrette. After the movie ended, our group walked a few blocks down to Holiday Cocktail Lounge, the filming location of the bar scenes, then walked down the stretch of 1st Street that we see at the film’s conclusion.