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Sauteed cave crickets, scrambled hornbill eggs with Olduvai style and drinks made with 10,000-year-old ice from the Arctic Circle may not be your usual meeting fare. But when you are the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and the event is the annual dinner forum of the Explorers Club for 1,200 people, you aim to please.
This year's theme was a tribute to the great apes, so the menu featured 1,000 pounds of food of the type eaten millions of years ago by apes and early homo sapiens in central Africa. Another year, the feast was the final dinner served before the Titanic sank in 1912, because the speaker was oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard, who discovered the shipwrecked ocean liner.
"We create a theme, do a great deal of research, invent recipes, and work closely with the Waldorf chef," says Walt Noonan, chairman of the club's Exotics Committee, which plans the annual theme and meal. "We strive to be as authentic as possible and we use no endangered species whatsoever."
PLANNERS MORE DEMANDING
But even when the menu is more mundane, meeting planners are now much more demanding and specific about food preferences than ever before. In the past decade, hotels and other meeting venues have been turning cartwheels to satisfy them.
"People want choices today. There's much more consciousness...