ABQ BioPark offers Japanese-inspired fivecourse dinner.
ABQ BioPark offers Japaneseinspired fivecourse dinner
Dinners inspired by the ABQ BioPark’s zoo animals and Botanic Garden are interactive, unique experiences.
The Japanese garden at the Botanic Garden will be the setting for “Destination Dinner: Japan” on Aug. 5. Items on the menu include tsukune (chicken meatballs), seaweed salad and shabu shabu, which is thinly sliced beef rib-eye served with dashi, a cooking stock, tofu, jasmine rice, carrot, scallion, cabbage, shiitake and enoki.
“The menu is Japaneseinspired. What we’re doing is unique in the metro area,” said Adina Mora, Taste of the ABQ BioPark catering sales manager. “We’re offering a unique dining experience that no one else can get in the city. We started the destination dinners last year … and basically what we’re offering is we have several different locations throughout the BioPark as well as the zoo. This particular dinner is Japanese-inspired and will take place in the Japanese garden, and it’s a five-course meal, and we’ll offer hors d’oeuvres, plus wine on the tables, family style.”
A Harvest Dinner will be held on Oct. 14 in the Heritage Farm at the Botanic Garden. The courses will be paired with wine and there also will be a bourbon tasting.
“We have our own farm, so we’re unique in that the Heritage Farm is an actual working farm,” said Annie Fedora, general manager of the BioPark’s Culinary Department. “… It was all actually designed after a turn-of-the-century farm. It’s beautiful. So because we have the farm, it would only make sense that we would do a harvest dinner, wouldn’t it? So we designed a harvest dinner based on some of the produce. … They have this festival, the Cider Festival, right around when they
have their harvest, and knowing what they are going to have then, we create a menu around it.”
The menus are created by the ABQ BioPark’s executive chef, Tom Garton. There are plans in the works for the “Continental Journey Dinner,” which will take diners from Africa into Asia with the giraffes and elephants at the zoo. Appetizers will be set up by the giraffe area and dinner will be served by the elephant area. Guests also will have the opportunity to feed and interact with the giraffes and share a special experience with the elephants, which Fedora said is a surprise.
“All these proceeds go to the New Mexico BioPark Society, and 10 percent off of anything we do all goes to the areas we are doing it in,” Fedora said.