BACK BAY — The Excellence in Agriculture banquet resumed this year as Virginia Beach’s preeminent agriculture event.
After a hiatus due to pandemic restrictions, the banquet on Thursday, March 23, returned during National Agriculture Week with aplomb.
In addition to celebrating farming families, as the banquet has done for decades, this year’s event also starred locally sourced food.
As a gourmand, I eagerly anticipated celebrating the local horn of plenty from southern Virginia Beach. The food, supplied by community sponsors and local farms, was prepared by Pungo Catering.
Reimagine Creeds Ruritan Community Complex as a French provincial dream bistro experience, though this meal was served as a buffet befitting a community meal. The arena where community and 4-H events are held was decked out country style, and the sense of camaraderie was palpable.
The menu prepared by Frank Craft of Pungo Catering was a bountiful blessing courtesy of local farm families.
The Market at Land of Promise Farms in Blackwater provided pork tenderloin that was sublime with Craft’s glaze drizzle.
Cromwell’s Produce in Pungo provided vegetables – cabbage and carrots shredded into cole slaw with a creamy family dressing, perfectly sautéed vegetables and orange-flesh sweet potatoes roasted and caramelized with a sprinkling of cinnamon.
An herb and pepper encrusted London broil came from beef provided by Coastal Cattle in Back Bay.
I arrived early to take in the Pungo Catering barbecue experience. Not the southern staple of pork roasted or cooked over hickory in Virginia or vinegar-based red paper and apple wood of neighboring North Carolina. This barbecue is the method that migrated from coastal Virginia to Texas to Kansas once upon a time. Craft and his team at Pungo Catering mastered it.
The cod was fried to crisp on the outside and moist on the inside perfection. As Craft completed slicing the meat and placing it in the resting bins, he stopped momentarily to approve the hue and taste of his first bash of hush puppies. Then, he sent the first batch off, manning the fryer himself for the following few pans.
“What was a hobby and cooking for family and friends has turned into a labor of love,” Craft said. “I’ll probably keep doing it as long as it’s fun.”
We first spoke two weeks before the big meal, when Craft was planning a menu that featured local ingredients.
“You don’t live or spend any length of time on a farm without learning to live off the land and what it produces, be it beef, poultry, pork or vegetables,” he said. “Even seafood when you crab and fish like we can do here.”
Craft spent his early summers on his grandfather’s Pungo farm.
What was once meals of daily survival is now considered fresh, sustainable haute cuisine to many, but much of what is grown today speaks to a time when what went on the table depended upon the season.
David Trimmer, director of the city’s agriculture department, spoke with me about the vital role of farming in the U.S. – and, of course, in Virginia Beach.
“Our goal is the continued growth of sustainability of our agriculture,” Trimmer said. “We eat our crop. We are selling it here. We serve 1.8 million people. … We work with the community, assist them in getting the highest and best use out of the land.”
The best use of rural Virginia Beach was displayed in the buffet served during the Excellence in Agriculture banquet.
It was an honor to be a part of a celebration of our own horn of plenty, a part of the city where the harvest still is the basis of heavenly meals.
The author is a writer and documentary filmmaker who grew up in Norfolk and lived in Virginia Beach for much of his life. He ran a production company, worked in college athletics and was curator at an art gallery in Virginia Beach for years.
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