3030 reunion dinner brings stellar crew together

If I were assembling a collection of South Florida chefs currently “killing it” — kitchen and youth parlance for doing exceptional things — it would look something like the 3030 Ocean reunion dinner on March 31 at Swank Farms in Loxahatchee.

They didn’t know it at the time, but the kitchen they shared a decade ago at chef Dean James Max’s 3030 Ocean restaurant at the Harbor Beach Marriott Resort in Fort Lauderdale turned out to be a culinary incubator of the highest order.

“This is legit,” Jeremy Ford, chef-owner of Stubborn Seed in Miami Beach, says about the reunion.

Max ran the restaurant from its 1999 opening until he left in 2013 for other pursuits. 3030 Ocean raised the bar for fine dining in Fort Lauderdale at the dawn of the new century.

“To see where everyone is 8 to 10 years later is kind of cool,” says Ford, who worked at 3030 for five years (2008-2013). “Everyone is more focused on where they are now, but an event like this makes you appreciate what we accomplished then.”

Ford is a winner of the TV cooking competition “Top Chef ” and runs what I consider the best fine-dining restaurant in South Florida. Niven Patel of Ghee Indian Kitchen in Miami is a semifinalist (again) for a James Beard Award as Best Chef in the South. Pushkar Marathe, who runs Ghee’s Design District location, is also executing at a Beard-worthy level.

Other 3030 Ocean alums who’ll be cooking at the $160-a-head dinner: Paula DaSilva, culinary director at the Fort Lauderdale RitzCarlton and runner-up on TV’s “Hell’s Kitchen”; Brooke