Photos courtesy of Company of Khanh from Wednesday’s test bake.
With Music Tastes Good less than a month away, two back-to-back cultural “pizza” parties in collaboration with the two-day music and food festival will be held this Friday and Saturday courtesy of Khanh Hoang, the pop-up dinner extraordinaire who has brought multicultural meals to the Long Beach masses (and small groups) over the past two years.
With Company of Khanh involved in the music festival this year, alongside chefs from Kafe Neo, Restauration and Lola’s Mexican Cuisine, to name just a few, Music Tastes Good reached out to Hoang to collaborate, alongside Beachwood Blendery and baker Arturo Enciso of Emmylou, to host a couple of events before September 30.
“Since we started talking about Khanh’s involvement at Music Tastes Good, and after we attended her Ethiopian inspired pop-up, we wanted more excuses to collaborate with her and the Company of Khanh team,” said Chris Watson, creative director of Music Tastes Good. “This event gives us a perfect excuse to eat, drink, and enjoy the intimacy of a small audience before our giant party at the end of the month.”
Enter the Earth Oven Series featuring cultural flat breads, two pop-up dinners this Friday, September 8 from 7:00PM to 11:00PM and Saturday, September 9 from 6:00PM to 10:00PM. Tickets are $65 per person.
The three-course menu, which includes vegetarian options, starts off with a Farmer’s Market Salad paired with Strawberry Provence, a Belgian-style sour ale with strawberries and Herbs de Provence. Next up you’ll be savoring the Palestinian Musakhan, a chewy flat bread spread with olive oil, caramelized onions, enriched with sumac, saffron, pine nuts and a slow-roasted half-chicken, paired with Fortune Favors the Funk, a sour ale dry-hopped with ex-598, a collaboration with Sierra Nevada.
The third course presents the Turkish grass-fed Beef Kiymali, a tangy yogurt infused dough hand-shaped into a boat and filled with ground beef and bell peppers, paired with Little Secret, a sour ale with raspberries, dry-hopped with Mosaic and Galaxy Hops. Guests will enjoy Chilled English Lavender Lemon Posset for dessert, a pudding with a citrusy vanilla flavor garnished with lavender buds.
Khanh, and her team, Molly Fraser, Di An Tran and Lillian Hu, chose cultural flat breads as the theme for the two pop-ups, deciding that the “Italian-style has dominated the local pizza scene long enough,” Hoang said.
And in expected MTG fashion (and with music and food pairing events in local demand) the Earth Oven Series will feature not just food, but a worldly selection of sounds courtesy of Eusebio Akasa and the acoustic melodies of Alyssandra Nighswonger on Friday, and the music of Fifty-Two Vista and Gregory DiMartino during Saturday’s pop-up.
“Company of Khanh’s mission is to spread different cultural cuisines, with hopes of promoting diversity and awareness, so that we can support and understand other communities,” Hoang said. “Food is the best way to bring people together. ‘Music tastes good’ has always been my motto. With good company, they are elements I find crucial to a good dinner party. We are all looking forward to closing out the summer with this event.”
The location of the dinners will be released when guests RSVP. For more information and/or to reserve a spot, check out the website here.