Donate. Nourish. Repeat.

The event at the JW Marriott on Saturday evening was all about food. About 300 paying guests turned out for the inaugural Island Chef Pantry Challenge benefiting Our Daily Bread Food Pantry (ODBFP), the Marco-based charity that is feeding thousands of local residents.

Chefs from seven island restaurants competed in preparing their best meal with limited time, limited resources, and a very limited and specific food palate – which they had no knowledge of until just as the challenge began. The chefs, representing CJ’s on the Bay, the Deck at 560, Fin Bistro, Kane at JW Marriott, Marco Prime, Pinchers, and the Oyster Society, each had a rudimentary cooking station set up in the Marriott’s Banyan Ballroom.

The meals they created, two “tasting plates” for the judges and one “show plate” for display, had to be based on the “mystery basket” items revealed just before the chefs went to work. Those ingredients, all items regularly given away by ODBFP, turned out to be a whole chicken, guava paste, broken rice, and squash. There was a moment of levity when emcee Mikey Termini announced it as “peyote squash,” and longtime Marco chef Laura Owen, who has been tasked with choosing the ingredients, had to correct that to chayote squash.

With the meal basics revealed, the seven chefs had five minutes to shop the pantry, pushing actual shopping carts around a well-stocked selection of foods and spices. No outside ingredients or assistants were allowed as they used their culinary experience, food savvy, and knife skills to prepare their entries, whipping up three servings of a gourmet meal in just 30 minutes.

The judges were two renowned chefs, Gerald Sombright, executive chef of the Club at the Dunes, and Asif Syed, executive chef at Ayre by Karma. Both have been featured on nationally televised cooking shows, and both at one time plied their trade at the JW. These experienced culinary pros held the competing chefs to a high standard but emphasized their empathy and understanding of just how difficult it is to create under these conditions, in a strange, bare-bones kitchen setup, with a rigid list of ingredients, and 300 people peering over their shoulders via the closed-circuit video cams.

About those 300 people – the sold-out event, held during the depths of summer, and the participation of seven esteemed local restaurants said good things about how Marco Island supports the less fortunate, those who deal with food insecurity, in other words, living without the basic human need of knowing where your next meal is coming from. The pantry challenge at the Marriott was a “cordon bleu” version of the challenge faced by families every day, when they struggle to put together nourishing meals with limited resources.

JW Marriott general manager Sharon Lockwood, who also is a volunteer at ODBFP, said the idea for the pantry challenge event came about during a conversation among the volunteers at Our Daily Bread.

“To me, this is a great example of getting our local culinary community together for an important cause. We are so proud to be able to host this event and celebrate our talented local chefs,” said Lockwood, who mentioned in an aside that she will be retiring from Marriott and stepping down from her position at the end of the year.

ODBFP board chairperson Allyson Richards and executive director Dr. Evelyn Rossetti-Ryan gave hugs and a big bouquet of flowers to Lockwood before letting the focus return to the event at hand.

While they didn’t get to sample each chef’s dish and had to settle for listening to the judges’ evaluations as they tried each of the plates, the crowd did not go hungry. Each participating restaurant put out a selection of hors d’oeuvres for the 300, with offerings such as puttanesca beef tartare from Marco Prime, char-grilled Spanish octopus from Fin Bistro, and shucked blue crab claws from Pinchers. The hotel followed up with a literal boatload of dessert bites prepared by their pastry chefs.

When time expired and the chefs presented their finished products, first place went to executive chef Christopher Barre of the Deck at 560, just down the street from the JW at the Marco Hilton. Second place went to specialty chef Hansen Ang of Kane, the home team restaurant at the Marriott. Third place was taken by the Oyster Society’s corporate executive chef Christopher DeGenova – although Sombright said from the judges’ table that “you made it very difficult for us. There was just a one-point spread between first and third place – and all these chefs are winners.”

Our Daily Bread Food Pantry is a local, Marco Island-based 501(c)3 charitable organization. They give away about two million lbs. of food every year, right here in our local community, with 94 cents of every dollar raised going directly to programs.