Fine food and the Fox Trot

Gail Phillips

One special Quail Creek Chartered Club available to all Quail Creek residents presents its membership with a wonderful mix of dining and dancing. For nine years the Ballroom Dance Club has been holding these evenings and with our current Executive Chef Aris Cabrera, and our Food and Beverage Chair Mary Lou Johnson, our delectable dining experience has become the best that is available at any catered function held in the Madera Clubhouse.

After research and development of themes for each of our four dinner dances, Mary Lou designs her potential menus. Yes, these meals are not on the catering menus but give Chef Aris an opportunity to really shine at a banquet.

Chef Aris develops menus for all the food venues in Quail Creek including The Grill, The Oasis Lounge and all catering at Madera Clubhouse. He orders the necessary ingredients and is often on the line in the kitchen at The Grill. He is extremely knowledgeable about food and food preparation and in the case of the Ballroom Dance Club, Chef Aris is able to step outside the box and prepare mouth watering food for the Ballroom Dance Membership.

Quail Creekers are known for their love of foreign and national travel. Taking advantage of this particular knowledge, Mary Lou is developing a series of unique themed dinners and she and Chef Aris will take us, through our taste buds, to the following exotic dining locations:

We’ll travel to the 647 Dinner Club in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the Blue Elephant in Bangkok, Thailand, to the Dionysos in Athens, Greece, and then back to Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans, Louisiana.

To enhance our dining ambiance, our Social Chair Shelly Johnson will be working with a local flower shop to find flowers representative of these locations to decorate our formally set tables. At each restaurant stop on our dining/dancing calendar, one lucky couple at each table will be going home with one of these beautiful floral arrangements.

This year our four fabulous dinner dances take place in the Crystal Ballroom at Madera Clubhouse on December 18, 2013, and January 22, February 12 and March 12 in 2014. Dancing begins at 5:30 p.m. with dinner served at 6:30 p.m., and at 7:30 p.m. the band returns for two more hours of dancing.

For additional details on how to become a part of this truly delicious, wonderfully musical evening contact Membership Chair Justine Lewis at [email protected] or President Steve Huhta at [email protected].