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FALL RIVER — The annual Fabric Arts Festival is back this month for a three-day event showcasing art in its many forms, from eye-popping sculptures and murals to musical performances.
This year for the first time organizers will also be serving it up on a plate.
Be prepared to be pleasantly surprised as Fabric, slated for May 12 to 14, weaves a food aspect into the festival’s third edition, but not in a traditional way.
Both artists and chefs will be bringing some creative culinary experiences to the table — whether it’s a contemporary spin on Portuguese feast fare or a hands-on gastronomical journey.
“What I’m doing with my dinner is saying here are these flavors you’re so familiar with and let me turn it on its head for you,” said Mitch Mauricio, a Fall River native and local chef billed among Fabric’s lineup of 2022 artists.
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After the past couple of festivals were upended by the pandemic, Fabric is bringing the community back together with a much-anticipated in-person event.
Presented by Casa dos Açores da Nova Inglaterra, Fabric is organized by Michael Benevides, festival co-founder and owner of Fall River’s Portugalia Marketplace, and Portugal-based curators and fellow co-founders Jesse James and Sofia Carolina Botelho, directors of a similar festival in the Azores.
This year’s theme is “Where We Meet,” and will feature three programming areas, one exploring visual arts and architecture — which will include the unveiling of three new public art installations along the Quequechan River Rail Trail — one showcasing music and sounds, and a final food series titled A Table for Many.
Benevides said the culinary component is something his partners in the Azores have been doing at their festival — creating communal tables and inviting guests to come in and break bread— and decided it was time to do the same here.
“This being an arts festival, we wanted an artistic element to the food, to the presentation and also to the experience,” he said.
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A Table for Many will feature two culinary events, one hosted at the Police Athletic League and one hosted at the Narrows Center for the Arts. According to festival organizers, it will be “a space of meeting, experimentation and intersection between the arts and gastronomy.”
At the first pop-up food experience, Table for Many No. 1, the culinary and musical art worlds collide in the unlikeliest of spaces.
A boxing gym will transform into a beautifully lit dining hall and performance venue on Thursday, May 12, where chef Mitch Mauricio will host a multi-course dinner. It will be formal, yet informal at the same time, Benevides said, as guests dine side by side at long, communal tables at the PAL Hall, 31 Franklin St.
“The plating, the atmosphere, the space, it’s a pretty unique overall experience,” Benevides said. “It’s a very fine dinner in an establishment that’s not so fine or refined.”
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Mauricio, 31, a Somerset resident and executive chef at Agawam Hunt country club in Rumford, Rhode Island, is excited to take the lead at this event.
“I love the city of Fall River and I love
that it’s on its way up since I was a kid with arts and music and stuff for the community… I felt it was almost irresponsible if I didn’t volunteer to help out. I’m from the city, I have Portuguese roots,” Mauricio said.
Mauricio, who traces his Portuguese roots to the Azorean islands of São Miguel on his father’s side and Flores on his mother’s side, hosts a supper club at Agawam Hunt featuring various themed menus, including an Azorean night.
A conversation with Benevides about hosting a similar supper club series at Portugalia led to an invite for Mauricio to take the helm at Table for Many.
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Mauricio said he initially felt out of place being asked to join the ranks of Fabric’s mostly visual and musical artists. But it was no question that Mauricio and his high-end culinary art skills fit the bill perfectly.
“Fine dining is a little more of an art experience in itself so I thought there’s no reason I shouldn’t be doing this,” Mauricio said.
The Johnson and Wales graduate has been cooking in restaurants since he was 15, working up through the ranks over the years. Mauricio previously served as head chef at Castle Hill in Newport, where cut his teeth in fine dining before helping revitalize the Agawam Club. He said he hopes to one day open a Portuguese restaurant of his own in the area.
While his Fabric menu is still under wraps, Mauricio said the theme is Portuguese Festa and will feature modern interpretations of some classic feast fare — like cacoila sandwiches or grilled sardines — through his eyes “as a kid from Fall River and a classically trained chef.”
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“My intention is to surprise people,” said Mauricio, who noted many festival attendees have hit the Portuguese feast circuit growing up in the area.
“It’s about reinventing what you know into something that is unfamiliar but still familiar at the same time,” he said. “My goal is to make people say, ‘Oh my god, that tastes like a cacoila sandwich but it doesn’t even look like it.'”
The chef said he hopes to help his guests “see what they know through a different lens and have a good time with it,” while bringing some pride to Portuguese food and to the city.
“We have such a unique cuisine here in the area and I just love diving into it and showing it off,” he said.
Mauricio said his biggest challenge will be adapting to the venue’s limitations and creating a four-course meal for 60 people without a kitchen.
Mauricio said he’ll be utilizing a lot of high-tech equipment to get the job done and different cooking methods that don’t involve stoves — such as sous vide, the process of vacuum-sealing food in a bag and cooking it in water baths, Japanese shichirin grills, small, portable barbecue grills made from cast iron that can be set up on the sidewalk outside the PAL, as well as induction burners.
He said a lot of prep work will be done ahead of time, so all that will be required the day of will be light heating, finishing and plating.
The dinner, which starts at 6 p.m., will be accompanied by a soundtrack of music from the band PMDS, an electronic duo from the Azores, who will close out the evening at the PAL with a live concert following dinner. The concert, which starts at 9 p.m. is free and open to all but registration is necessary.
A Table for Many 2, slated for the Narrows Center for the Arts on Friday, May 13, at 6 p.m., will offer a fun crash course in Portuguese cuisine.
While the first food event is more formal, Benevides said this one is meant to be informal and casual.
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Portuguese visual arts duo João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, who also share a passion for cooking, will be serving up a taste of Portuguese fare, with a generous helping of history and visuals to complement their meal.
Titled “The Semiotics of Cod,” the event aims to illustrate Portugal’s love affair with salt cod through a collective cooking session and performance lecture.
Don’t let the word lecture fool you. It may be set up like a classroom, with folks seated at two long tables, but guests will not be taking a backseat during this event.
Guests will gather on the second floor of the Narrows, at 16 Anawan St., where the pair will demonstrate how to prepare the famous Portuguese cod dish Bacalhau a Bras, while looking to audience members for help putting the meal together.
“There is an element of storytelling as well about why cod is near and dear to the Portuguese, how important it is to the culture, why people migrated to various areas for cod, why the Portuguese went to Norway and Nova Scotia and Gloucester,” Benevides said. “There’s a little bit of a history lesson along with a live cooking demo.”
Benevides said the duo has done a similar presentation for the Norwegian Seafood Council — Norway being one of the largest processors of salt cod — and anticipates attendees will have a lot of fun with this one.
“I think that they fit into a festival such as ours, which is experimental, it’s different, it’s unique,” Benevides said.
He said the ultimate goal with the Fabric Festival is to create a collective memory through unique experiences that leave people wanting more.
“We want to create these moments where a bunch of people are experiencing something that blows their mind or marks them that creates a memory … that’s what we look for in a festival is to try to create this experience that everyone is in the moment and vibing,” he said.
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It’s something he said organizers have been doing since Year 1 in hopes that these visitors then become ambassadors of the festival.
Benevides said the three-day event draws crowds from the Fall River area and beyond — as far as Boston, Providence and New York. Since the live festival had been on hiatus for two years it’s hard to tell how this edition will go, but Benevides said he has a good feeling about it.
“It’s not a festival exclusively for outsiders but it’s nice to bring outsiders in who come to Fall River in a completely different light and walk away with a completely different perception of this place,” Benevides said.
Seating at both Table for Many events is limited, so grab your tickets at the Fabric Arts Festival website at https://www.fabricfallriver.com.
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Portuguese food is part of Fall River’s Fabric Arts Festival
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