A $3 Million Obama Fundraiser: Menu And Activities

At his Atlantic Correspondents blog, James Warren details the $15,000-a-ticket fundraiser President Obama attended yesterday at a home on Chicago's North Side, where Obama reportedly raked in about $3 million. Baseball highlights were watched, and allegedly unimaginative food (which sounded pretty good to me) was eaten:

...Well, at the North Side home of Penny Pritzker, a close Obama chum and super fundraiser, there was a large, if culinarily unimaginative, early-evening buffet dinner, according to resourceful Mike Flannery, a reporter for Chicago's WBBM-TV and the best political journalist in town.

A highly-placed kitchen source told Mike that the buffet for the 100 attendees included rack of lamb, beef tenderloin; Ahi tuna; crab cakes; mushroom tart; lobster and shrimp jambalaya; flat breads with chutney and goat cheese; and rice crackers and seaweed salad.

Mike, a cerebral Georgetown University graduate, will admit to not being a potential contestant on Bravo's "Top Chef." But my Pulitzer Prize-winning wife, a bonafide ace cook, sniffed that it sounded "like a buffet at Houlihan's." Ouch. That's a decidedly uninspired downtown restaurant that's a slight improvement over T.G.I Friday's. Then, again, she studied cooking in Paris.

As for dessert, it included tea cookies; fruit finger tarts; chocolate mousse; mini-cheesecakes; strawberries and blueberries; and chocolate éclair. Again, it wasn't Alinea, a nearby restaurant deemed the best in America by Gourmet magazine. But so what?

"You don't spend $15,000 for dinner," said Norman Bender, a plumbing magnate from Woodbridge, Conn., among guests who came from across the land and, in one case, London. "We got to speak to the President of the United States."...

Full account at James Warren's Corrspondents blog.