Gather for a Taste-y evening in Tuscany

Farm fresh and funky flavors were placed on the Taste table in July 2024, as Chef Jyll Everman served a collection of eclectic plates with Wisconsin-sourced ingredients to make any foodie excited to return for the next Taste event and book their next trip abroad.

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The wonderful farms of Wisconsin

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Although the summer Taste event doesn’t typically have a theme, centering mainly on the fresh Wisconsin and Green Bay ingredients being displayed, Chef Everman decided she wanted to recreate an evening in Italy for this menu.

“I love Italian foods and I’ve been craving that cuisine so much lately, that I didn’t want to hold back from my guests,” commented Jyll, “My family and I cooked, ate, and traveled our way through Italy about five years ago. I’ve wanted to incorporate what I’ve learned into an event at Gather, so I finally shaped a Tuscan-themed evening for a Taste event.”

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“I cooked from other regions aside from Tuscany, but it was a Tuscan-inspired evening,” she explained. “I always follow my gut instinct if something’s been on my mind because I didn’t always have all of these ideas.”

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Before Gather was selling out of their events, from 2017 to 2019, Chef Everman was conducting a Taste event every month, trying to bring awareness to the business and people through their doors. Her friends and employees warned her this was too much for one chef to harbor, but it wasn’t until her husband and Gather co-owner, Tommy Everman, suggested one Taste event a season would be much more manageable, that Jyll had to agree. 

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“I was uninspired -- it was just too much work! I was doing things I'd never even heard of because I was out of ideas,” Jyll laughed. “Now it's much easier for me to hone in on exactly what I want to do, and be excited about it instead of it feeling like it's just another job. Now, I love the whole process from start to finish.”

Dropping the frequency of the Taste events, Chef Everman now has time to peruse the summer’s farmers markets leading up to these events, even checking out the inventory and stands up to the day before the Taste event. Wisconsin has a wide variety of naturally grown produce, with something always ready to excite and inspire Everman’s next theme.

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“The rainy spring and summer we’ve been experiencing has affected many crops on numerous farms, leaving some of the typical produce and ingredients I like to work with unavailable,” explained Jyll. “Because of this, I’ve had to take inventory very frequently.”

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“For our summer taste, I used fresh ingredients from the local farms and farmers’ markets, and I walked both the Wednesday and Saturday farmers’ markets, planning my menu off of what looked freshest and most abundant at that time. Wisconsin has such wonderful farms, each farmers market I walk through is so beautiful, filled with a lot of the same produce from different farms.”

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This abundance of natural produce is perfect for this Tuscan-summer theme, as Chef Everman explains that a lot of Italian cooking comes from very simple and accessible ingredients.

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“Italian food is beautifully simplistic,” she sighed dreamily. “The flavor palette is minimal, you don't need a ton of crazy ingredients, you just have to make them taste amazing. Everything on this menu was gorgeous and in season, and I was so excited to cook with it. I love making pasta, I love so much of the simplicity of what goes into Italian food and I knew that during the summer dinner would be a wonderful way to showcase a lot of that.”

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The Italian palette and cooking style pair perfectly with Jyll’s plating routine and structure for each one of her cooking events, so her imagination and inspiration were truly running rampant with this theme, excited by all of her opportunities and how she would make them a reality.

“The parameter for all of my dishes follows that of a protein, a starch, and a sauce; from there, I can concentrate on what I’ll add to make it unique and even more delicious. I try my ideas multiple different ways in the kitchen, and perfect my flavors and plating from there,” said Jyll. “Even though I have all of these ideas floating around in my head, I usually end up creating versions of these general ideas.”

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From Green Bay, Wisconsin to Tuscany, Italy

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About a week or two weeks before each Taste event, Gather posts the menu and whether or not ticket sales remain available to the public, as tickets have sold out from the mailing list alone in the past. These menus are always kept brief, with the signature components and style of the dish listed and nothing else, to allow for any last-minute changes with ingredients or deliveries, and to keep an element of surprise for the ticket purchasers.

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“I love drama and surprises, so I love keeping the menu vague so that you’re not exactly sure what is about to be placed in front of you,” Chef Everman grinned. “Under-promising and over-delivering seems to be the line I live by, and people seem to love it! We sold out Thursday from the mailing list alone, Friday was the only day we had live ticket sales, which we also sold out before the event.”

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Taste event attendees are always in for a treat and surprise, if not multiple; for this evening abroad, Chef Everman created delectable zucchini flowers, made from locally sourced zucchini, and paired them with her favorite source of protein: seafood.

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“I stuffed zucchini blossoms, or zucchini flowers, with shrimp risotto over a wonderful lobster sauce,” she listed. “Full Circle Community Farm provided the zucchinis for that dish, paired with fresh herbs from my garden. I was so excited for my staff to try this dish as much as I was excited for our guests to try it because it is a brand new idea of mine. Surprising my staff is so much fun because it doesn’t happen as often as I get to surprise guests.”

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Following this palette from under the sea, Chef Everman included a poached Red Snapper fourth course, and bookended the menu with fresh fruit, providing for a very light menu overall. The opener to the evening included a Bresaola Carpaccio with tart apple and caper berries, and the evening closed with a fresh apricot and pistachio granita.

“I have a deep love of stone fruit, and while we were in Italy, we saw a lot of apricot dishes, so my pitch to Maddie [pastry chef - Maddie Meyer] was apricot and some sort of tort or beautiful olive oil cake, and Maddie was adamant that she had a better idea,” Jyll giggled. “Maddie knew about this Italian dessert of apricot granita with homemade brioche, and the more she talked about it the more I saw her vision. I was as surprised as everybody else when she produced the final product. Her desserts are always beautiful and delicious, and I would be silly to try and rein that in.”

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Both evenings from this Tuscan-themed menu went beautifully, selling out both evenings has become pretty standard for Gather, and the business has received rave reviews for Chef Jyll Everman’s creations yet again, however, that does not lessen her anxieties for anything less than perfection.

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“Tommy and I sit over a bowl of cereal at the end of the night after every one of these events because I'm always starving, and I will pick apart everything that went wrong from my point of view,” Jyll laughed sheepishly. “Even if 99% of the reviews we received back had 9s and 10s, if I even get one 7, I won't sleep for a week.”

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Dedicated to always outdoing herself with each Taste event, attendees can ready their schedules for the next one in the fall, featuring produce by Adam’s Heirlooms. Join the mailing list and set alerts for Gather’s social media posts to be the first to know when the next dates are available to purchase tickets.

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https://www.gatheronbroadway.com/ 

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