Chef Collab: The Year of Pig Feasts w/Chef Matt Abdoo & Chef Shuai Wang 2/7/19
Chef Collab: The Year of Pig Feasts w/Chef Matt Abdoo & Chef Shuai Wang 2/7/19
thursday, february 7th, 2019
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm cocktail hour
7:00pm - late three course dinner
pig beach (map)
Join culinary rockstars Chef Matt Abdoo (Chef/Owner at Pig Beach & Pig Bleeker) and Chef Shuai Wang (Chef/Owner at Short Grain SC ), as they team up for one night of crazy culinary collaboration. Visiting from South Carolina, Chef Shuai brings ‘untraditional [Japanese] flavors’ to the table, which are the perfect balance to Chef Matt Abdoo’s bbq concoctions. Gather your finest crew and come on out to Pig Beach for a 6-7pm Cocktail Hour & Passed Hors d’oeuvres followed by a three course family style menu!
On The Menu
Cocktail Hour & Passed Hors d’Oeuvres (6-7pm)
Drinks
Oolong High Arnold Palmers
Tiger Beer
Salty Rinse Albariño
Austerity Cabernet Sauvignon
Hors d’Oeuvres
Sambal Pimento Cheese Crab Rangoon
Tasso Spiced Pork Belly Slider with Gochujang Ranch & BB Pickles
Yankee Red Hot Pigs in Donuts with Jeff’s Peps
Appetizers
Pickles n' Such
Pickled Shrimp, Herbed Slaw, Bama Sauce & Peanuts
Crispy Smoked Pork Trotter, Ginger Coconut Rice & Chinese Mustard Aioli
Entrées:
Fam Style Bo Ssam
Whole Smoked Pork Shoulder
Sichuan Spiced Pork Belly
Sticky Fried Ribs
Accompanied by: BBQ Field Peas & Peanuts, Corn Bread with Miso & Sorghum Butter, Baked Cheesy Rice Cakes Soy Braised Collards with Burnt Ends, and Scallion Pancakes
Dessert
Matcha Crepe Cake
About Matt Abdoo & Pig Beach


Matt is the chef/partner of the Brooklyn barbecue restaurant Pig Beach and Pig Bleecker, a full-service restaurant with a focus on smoked-centric comfort food in NYC's Greenwich Village. Both restaurants have been celebrated by diners and critics alike including a great review from Eater's resident meat expert Nick Solares, who named Pig Beach one of their "Essential Barbecue Restaurants," and an enthusiastic one-star review from The New York Times for Pig Bleecker. Matt first earned his BBQ chops during his time working on America’s highly competitive barbecue teams, Salty Rinse, receiving 2nd place medal for Whole Hog in 2015 and 1st Place for Best Sauce (Mustard) at the annual Memphis in May World Championship. Prior to opening his own restaurants, Matt was the Chef de Cuisine of Del Posto and during is tenure, the restaurant received a coveted four-star review from the New York Times, and the Relais & Chateaux distinction. Matt is a frequent guest chef on The Today Show and has appeared on NBC's The Chew and DirecTV's Fantasty Zone.
About Chef Shuai Wang & Short Grain Charleston SC

This bio is an excerpt from the article “Shuai Wang: Using Japanese Flavors and Charleston History to Drive Change” on Eater.com.
Corrie and Shuai Wang moved to the Lowcountry with the promise of jobs from a friend opening a new restaurant. Both were industry vets. The couple met when he was chef de cuisine at the West Village izakaya Chez Sardine and she worked front of house.
When their friend's restaurant was delayed indefinitely and the opportunity fell through, they started looking for other employment. "I was at the point where I didn't really want to work for anyone else," recalls Shuai. "I work really hard. I give 110 percent, so I thought, why not work for myself?" That's when he and Corrie decided to open the Short Grain food truck. He worked the line and she took customers' orders.
Short Grain set up in different locations around Charleston each day to serve "untraditional Japanese cuisine." The F&B community was all aflutter over Shuai's food, Eater broke the story, and one of the city's toughest critics gave them a winning review, stating that "there are instances in which food served from a truck is so stupendous that it would be criminal to ignore it."

The lack of an easy opportunity to work in someone else's restaurant ultimately defined Shuai's career path in the South. "I'm never one to worry about anything. Strangely, things just seem to work out," he states. "Our food was a little strange — there was nothing like it around here, but we just had to find our people to love us for who we are."
For the culinary-minded adventurers in Charleston, something was always missing; once it arrived in the form of Short Grain, Wang's "untraditional Japanese" menu filled a gap between old-school Charleston and what's to come. It took an outsider with a different point of view to realize a change could happen and that the Holy City could accept a chirashi bowl of local fish. No one's sure why it took so long for someone to realize that a city with a history of rice and seafood should be showcasing the two together in a beautiful manner, but the city is lucky this Chinese-born, Japanese izakaya chef from New York figured it out.