Cochon 555 Event This Weekend Looks to Bring All the Senses Together, with Pork No Less

By Seth Daniel

The SoWa Art and Design District in the South End will play host to a unique weekend of events that includes everything from an art show incorporating food, drink and music, to a competition between chefs who are delivered live hogs and are to create something tasty out of them in one week.

The three-pronged festival at SoWa includes the events Create on Friday, Bespoke on Saturday and Cochon 555 on Sunday. Each will have their own unique hook to them, organizers said.

On Friday, Create will debut the fun when Chef Louis DiBaccari of Tavern Road (Congress Street) pairs up-and-coming artists with the next wave of the city’s top chefs and bartenders.

The opening evening will showcase Boston’s vibrant community of homegrown talents. It will be set to a soundtrack of live music, both instrumental and electronic. Collaborating on the evening will be Sneaker Pimps, the world’s largest sneaker exhibition and street-inspired art show.

“When I think of a Create experience, it has a head spinning aspect to it,” he said. “There’s a lot of stimulus. There’s a lot going on around you. It’s perfect if you have ADD. It’s built for that.”

He said it’s the sixth year for the Create event, but he thinks it will be the best yet.

“We really hope this is a breakthrough year for us,” he said. “I can’t find anyone else who’s done food and art and drinks and music together to help me out with some ideas. I can understand that though because it’s really tough.”

On Saturday, the Bespoke conference will take place, with the Oxford Food Symposium on the docket.

Robert McKeown, Bespoke chairman and Cochon communications director, said the Symposium has never been outside of Oxford until now. The all-day event focuses on ‘Food and Landscape’ and will feature Dr. Amy Trubek, author of ‘Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terrior,’ and Adam Sharp, formerly Twitter’s head of news, politics and elections.

A four person panel in the PowerStation at SoWa will focus on ‘Power, Labor, and Class in the Food Industry.’

The event will cost $50 for those in the food industry and $75 for the general public.

“The Oxford Symposium has never had anything outside of Oxford, so people will be able to attend this for the first time without having to travel to Oxford,” said McKeown. “We’re beginning in Boston and going to seven other cities.”

Sunday looks to be an extremely unique event.

One week before the event, five chefs are delivered five 220-pound hogs by five farmers. The chefs do not know the breed or anything about the hogs before they are delivered, adding to the complexity. They have a week to butcher, prepare and serve a six-course tasting menu for the judges and crowd attending Cochon on Sunday.

There will also be a cocktail experience to wash it down.

“It’s a pretty special event,” said McKeown. “To put this through and open it up is really, really special. Boston is the perfect place to do it, other than San Francisco. Boston has culture, art, education and food and people who care about what that means. It has the people who understand the importance of these things we’re going to be talking about. Food comes down to people. If we’re going to fix a broken system, it’s going to take people.”

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