The Manhattan Beach City Council last week approved a high-end dinner featuring sustainable seafood and fine wine on the beach just north of the pier. The dinner, part of the Los Angeles Times Food Bowl, a month-long series of events, will take place May 24.
The proposal met some initial resistance due to its inclusion of alcohol and its exclusiveness. Only one other event on the beach features alcohol, the Manhattan Beach Open volleyball tournament. Tickets to the Food Bowl will cost $235.
“This is something I would love to attend…but I’m absolutely opposed to holding it at this location,” said Councilperson David Lesser. “I cherish that beach. I cherish its low-intensity use.”
Lesser noted that the only other event the city allows alcohol on the beach for is the Manhattan Open, and the justification for that is its non-exclusiveness — alcohol sales allow 75 percent of tourney seats to remain free of charge.
“I also just worry about the precedent.What would come next?” Lesser said. “I can think of any number of other organizations, all-laudable, with any number of proposals that would also want to do some sort of event there, and for that reason, I cannot support it.”
The beach is owned by LA County, whose Department of Beaches and Harbors approved the Food Bowl event, pending Manhattan Beach City Council approval.
Angus Dillon, the LA Times Food Bowl founder, and executive producer noted that the event will bring positive attention to Manhattan Beach and its chefs and would be educational in its emphasis on sustainable seafood. The Food Bowl festival takes place throughout Los Angeles and is intended to highlight the region’s culinary diversity. Last year, its inaugural, drew more than 100,000 people. This year, more than 250 events are planned, including neighborhood food tours, a discussion about food in space at UCLA, and Night Market, an outdoor food market in Grand Park that will feature more than 50 restaurants and food trucks.
“I think of it as a month long, progressive dinner party, a way for all of us to explore this town and the enormous diversity that we have in terms of food and the people who cook it,” Times food editor Amy Scattergood wrote in her paper last month.
The Food Bowl operates as a non-profit, Dillon told the Council and aims to raise awareness and funds to fight food waste, hunger, food insecurity (especially among the homeless) and promote sustainability and waste reduction through charity partners, including L.A. Kitchen, Food Forward and Midnight Mission. He said the festival would earmark funds locally for the Roundhouse restoration project. Dillon also noted that Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold is one of the festivals key organizers, and his brother, Mark Gold, the former director of Heal the Bay and now a chancellor at UCLA, is involved in its efforts to promote seafood sustainability.
“The purpose of this event is to demonstrate sustainable seafood and promote sustainable seafood practices in restaurants,” Dillon said.
The Manhattan Beach event will feature a 300 ft. long table and be hosted by Outstanding in the Field, which holds a long table, family-style dinners on farms, beaches, piers, and cliffs around the world as a way to celebrate local food sourcing and chefs and reconnect diners with the sources of their food. Founder Jim Develin is also a sand artist and intends to make sand art at the Manhattan Beach event.
Councilperson Steve Napolitano pressed Dillon on including an educational component in local schools.
“I appreciate the message, but this is an event for the well-heeled,” Napolitano said, citing the ticket price and the number of attendees, 300.
Dillon said he was open to adding an educational element for local schools. Kelly Stroman, executive director of the Downtown Business Association, which supported the proposal, said that throughout May speakers on topics such as sustainable seafood would be featured at the Manhattan Beach Farmers Market.
Councilperson Nancy Hersman said the package looked beneficial to the city and questioned a local aversion to opening the beach to new events.
“I, too, am feeling the conflict, and part of this conflict is our community,” Hersman said. “How do I say this nicely? Our community tends to really not want visitors… We want to keep it for ourselves, and we have conflicts with that. I see this all the time. It’s just really interesting to me that we love our restaurants, but here’s an opportunity to showcase our wonderful chefs and we’re like, ‘Nope, not here. Do it somewhere else.’ ”
Mayor Amy Howorth agreed.
“We have the folks working really hard to try to make their restaurants really fantastic, and they need people to come in, they can’t just be supported by us here,” Howorth said. “So here is an opportunity, a very classy event, a very controlled event — it’s not 5,000 people at the beach.”
“Some would argue that the Six Man [volleyball tournament] had alcohol for years,” said Councilperson Steve Napolitano. “Classy.”
“They’re looking for a natural sort of environment to host this, something that’s epic and amazing,” Howorth said. “Our beach and our pier, those are epic and amazing places… There’s a lot of prestige in having a Jonathan Gold event in our community, and being a part of the LA Food Bowl would be amazing.”
Resident Bill Victor said the event, however nice, would represent an invasion of a beach long held sacred locally and set a dangerous precedent.
“I think that it would be very hard to deny anyone else, Boy Scouts of America, harmonica players from San Francisco, anybody else who will want to have an event for a noble thing like what is recommended here,” Victor said. “And I think the price of it also is very — it excludes a lot of people, and I think that’s elitist.”
Napolitano said he’d be willing to support the Food Bowl event on a one-time trial basis.
“This really is just a neat event on the beach,” he said. “I think it would be a lot more meaningful if you took 300 inner city kids and brought them out and talked to them about sustainability and [gave them] a fancy dinner… But that’s not what’s being asked here. What’s being asked, as part of a larger message, is something that does tie into the coast, and the beach, and sustainability. I’m willing to experiment and see where it goes from here, with the idea that I don’t want to make a habit of this, and the next one might not get approved.”
Napolitano also noted that Manhattan Beach would like to be considered as a host for events during the 2028 Olympics, and an event such as this likewise represented being part of the larger LA community.
“We can’t just keep it to ourselves,” he said. “It’s a public beach.”
The proposal was approved, 4-1, with Councilperson Richard Montgomery, also approving and Lesser dissenting.
“I’ll be at Shellback,” Lesser joked.
“You can go to Shellback,” Howorth said. “And have popcorn or something.”
