Paul and Young Ron Take on the South Beach Wine & Food Festival

Inveterate radio jocks Paul Castronovo and Ron Brewer of Big 105.9 and 97.9 got all up in the SoBe Wine & Food Fest's businazz this morning, hosting an Iron Chef style cooking challenge live from the Fontainebleau (holy crap, did I spell that correctly?). The pair tested their cooking skills...

By John Linn

February 20, 2009

Audio By Carbonatix

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Inveterate radio jocks Paul Castronovo and Ron Brewer of Big 105.9 and 97.9 got all up in the SoBe Wine & Food Fest's businazz this morning, hosting an Iron Chef style cooking challenge live from the Fontainebleau (holy crap, did I spell that correctly?). The pair tested their cooking skills against each other in front of a slew of actual chefs and food glitterati -- peeps like Emeril Lagasse, Gail Simmons, Michelle Bernstein, and major-fucking-tool Guy Fieri. Most of the cooking seemed to be done by FIU culinary students - at least on Young Ron's side - but the two radio hosts actually pulled out some decent dishes.

Ron did grouper sliders and some odd concoction of orange juice-poached shrimp on a cheddar tea biscuit, while Paul did some sort of grouper dish (they chose to berate Ron's dishes most of the time rather than explain Paul's). Some of it sounded OK, and well, I guess it should. These guys obviously know how to eat, as you can see in the slideshow up on their website. The audio is up in the archives, and as you can imagine, it was largely punctuated by Emeril, who, for some reason, has only one mode of communication: loud. But he's still sort of charming and charismatic, in a sugarey, catch-phrasey sort of way.

Anyway, the show was goofy, and sort of funny, and all-in-all a neat start to the SoBe W&F weekend.

John Linn

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