The delayed response entrepicurean

The title of this post is a reflection of the time it has taken me to create the blog entry, rather than having anything to do with the dinner itself, which took place ten days ago! As usual, we took a picture of all guests seated around the dinner table, as shown above. Moving clockwise from the lower left, you can see yours truly, Mary Chiochios (co-host), Emily Green, Ed Lafferty and Daniel Pereira.

Emily, who was CEO of the Yankee Group when I met her at a conference in Madrid two years ago, is now running a really interesting company called Smart Lunches that meets two important needs: providing a nutritious lunch for your child at school, and relieving the busy parent from having to prepare a lunch everyday.

Ed is CFO and partner at Saturn Partners, a Boston-based VC firm that invests in a very interesting variety of companies. It is also interesting that Ed's background is in accounting and finance, somewhat unusual for a VC. Daniel is a digital media professional with several movies under his belt and an impressive career that has included positions at MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium and IBM's Digital Media Laboratory. I am always in awe of people like Daniel who have such creative energy and productivity! Mary was back at the co-hosting spot, and in addition to her usual excellent job as a co-host, she brought some delicious fresh pastries from an excellent bakery in East Boston. You can see the pastries in the picture - yum!

I must confess that the details of the conversation are a bit blurry as I write this post ten days later. I remember discussing Emily's company, and her stories of learning about the complexity of parents' concerns about their children's meals. It was also fascinating to hear about Ed's involvement with The Ride, a company that organizes tours through New York, with actors planted at various locations providing live interactive performances as the company's high-tech motor coaches drive by. At one point the discussion moved to the quality of life in various parts of Boston, spurred by the fact that Daniel is looking for a place through the summer, as he is pursuing some new activities and trying to decide whether he will stay here or end up back in LA. I also really enjoyed an exchange with Emily in which she asked a lot of great questions about how we run the business at Icosystem. In spite of the wine and beer I think I was able to give some coherent responses to what sometimes seems like our incoherent behavior...

The Food

For this dinner I decided to go back to basics. After the usual spread of mixed appetizers (some of which you can see in the picture), we served gnocchi with a very plain homemade tomato sauce. This was accompanied by chicken scaloppine in Marsala sauce (I have found that veal is unreliable), accompanied by a salad of mixed greens with goat cheese and dried cranberries. The dessert consisted of the aforementioned (and "aforepictured") pastries.

The meal was washed down with a nice selection of red and white wines brought by the guests, including a Mouton Cadet white Bordeaux, Elena Walch Chardonnay, Layer Cake Shiraz and a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo by Cantina Zaccagnini.