Corporate & Incentive Travel
January 1st, 2015
With so many of the new restaurants being opened touting their farm-to-table regimen of locally sourced seasonal ingredients, it’s hard to claim any truly unique innovation at this point.
However, the Aloft Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina — one of the least well-known but truly sensational regional food destinations in the country — has indeed discovered something new.
The hotel works with 20-year-old, Asheville-based No Taste Like Home to give meeting attendees a one-of-a-kind culinary experience. Programs for groups include foraging expeditions in local woods, “show and smell” presentations, cooking classes and five-course wild food banquets. The company’s signature experience combines “lookin’ and cookin.’ ” Attendees are taken “out to eat.” Expert guides lead them on a woodland shopping spree, gathering wild mushrooms, plants and other extreme cuisine. Small servings are cooked up in the great outdoors, then the rest of the gathered food is taken back to the hotel, where the restaurant or caterer prepares a banquet featuring the unique and healthful, highly nutritious, tasty foods.
No Taste Like Home is the only forage-to-table company in the U.S. Its tours have been ranked by Fodor’s as one of the 10 best food experiences in the world. In 2010, Time called foraging “the latest culinary obsession.” Noma Restaurant of Copenhagen, whose always-changing menu is entirely focused on foraging, has been the No. 1 restaurant in the world three of the past four years. It has made foraging and self-catering a worldwide phenomenon that No Taste Like Home delivers to meeting planners and attendees.