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The Group Travel Leader Going on Faith Select Traveler

Culinary Meeting Encounters

Eugene, Oregon

The love of local food “is pretty indicative of the West Coast,” said Janis Ross, vice president of convention and sports marketing for Eugene Cascades and Coast/Travel Lane County.

That’s due in part to western Oregon’s natural bounty: cultivated farms and vineyards, wild nuts and berries, plentiful seafood and river fish. The chef at Eugene, Oregon’s largest conference hotel, the Hilton Eugene, pulls her red wagon to the farmers market a block away to stock up on in-season produce, Ross said. And when the farmers market isn’t running, she buys directly from local farmers.

Eugene hosts the annual Oregon Truffle Festival every January. The festival features a marketplace, cooking classes, tastings and a high-end truffle dinner with chefs from around the world. This year was the inaugural Joriad North American Truffle Dog Championship. But meeting attendees can taste truffles at local specialty food shops year-round, or the CVB can help arrange a foraging foray into the forest with a local food expert as guide.

“This is the one part of the country where truffles are wild grown; they’re not crops,” Ross said. “You can go into the forest and find truffles.”

Groups can also forage for other wild fare, including blueberries, blackberries and hazelnuts.

Seafood and river fish are so fresh, they’re practically still flopping. The agency once arranged a group dinner with wild salmon that was caught that morning, Ross said. Meeting attendees can also go on outfitter-led fishing trips on the Willamette River and cook what they catch.

www.eugenecascadescoast.org

 

Mobile, Alabama

Mobile, Alabama, sits on Mobile Bay and is only an hour north of the Gulf of Mexico, so “fresh seafood is a staple here,” said Stacy Hamilton, vice president of marketing and communications for the Mobile Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Most Sunday afternoons, depending on the season, visitors will find free crawfish boils — crawfish is boiled in a big pot with potatoes, corn on the cob, sausage and other sides, then dumped on a table to eat — at local restaurants and bars. The tradition began as a way to draw in patrons, but it has almost become a friendly competition among establishments. If a group comes to town, the CVB can easily set up a crawfish boil or a shrimp boil.

The area is also known for oysters — fresh shucked, baked, boiled, covered in spinach and cheese — the variations are endless. For meeting groups, the CVB can bring in experts who will shuck oysters during the event and serve them on the half shell.

The CVB can also arrange for groups to go out on the gulf on a working shrimp trawler or oyster boat, then port at Bayou La Batre, the same town featured in “Forrest Gump,” where they can tour a shrimp- or oyster-processing facility and get a “fascinating peek into the seafood industry,” Hamilton said. The experience comes full circle with a fresh seafood dinner.

“The whole farm-to-table movement is alive and well throughout the country, but here, it’s more gulf-to-table,” she said.

www.mobile.org