Special Events

Johnny V goes on TV, again

Chef Johnny Vinczencz will be featured on the Food Network's Iron Chef America, battling Iron Chef Bobby Flay. Chef de Cuisine Dwayne Adams and Pastry Chef Malka Espinel will be working with Vinczencz on his culinary team. The battle will take place at the Food Network Studio in New York City on the afternoon of January 25, 2006.

The show pits guest chefs against one of three celebrity chefs (Bobby Flay, Mario Batali or Masaharu Morimoto). The chefs must prepare four courses featuring the secret ingredient, which is revealed at the beginning of the battle.

The secret ingredient and air date remain to be announced...keep your eye on our events calendar for updates!

Iron Chef America
Episode IA0324

Featured Chef: Johnny Vinczencz

January 21 – January 28, 2007

Johnny V, Ft. Lauderdale and South Beach, FL
Bursting on the culinary scene in 1995 at Astor Place on Miami Beach, Johnny Vinczenzc gained national acclaim for his Caribbean-influenced New Florida cuisine. He acquired the nickname "Caribbean Cowboy" for his bold and sophisticated personal and culinary style. While at Astor Place, Esquire magazines's John Mariani called Vinczencz "a chef to keep your eye on," and his restaurant was lauded in Gourmet, Bon Appetit and on the Food Network. His current venture, Johnny V, has been praised in The Miami Herald and Wine Spectator. The ever-innovative Vinczencz, whose approach has been described as "part whimsical, part comfort food and part sophistication," has appeared on The Today Show and Food Network's Iron Chef America, where he challenged chef Bobby Flay. For more information, Click here.

Johnny V goes on TV, again

Chef Johnny Vinczencz will be featured on the Food Network's Iron Chef America, battling Iron Chef Bobby Flay. Chef de Cuisine Dwayne Adams and Pastry Chef Malka Espinel will be working with Vinczencz on his culinary team. The battle will take place at the Food Network Studio in New York City on the afternoon of January 25, 2006.

The show pits guest chefs against one of three celebrity chefs (Bobby Flay, Mario Batali or Masaharu Morimoto). The chefs must prepare four courses featuring the secret ingredient, which is revealed at the beginning of the battle.

The secret ingredient and air date remain to be announced...keep your eye on our events calendar for updates!

Johnny V goes on TV
By John Tanasychuk
Staff Writer
Posted June 3 2005

The James Beard Foundation 2005 Event   

Johnny Vinczencz, Malka Espinel, and Dwayne Adams

Bubbles & Barbecue Johnny Vinczencz Johnny V Restaurant & Lounge | Fort Lauderdale, FL With Champagnes by Laurent-Perrier

Wednesday, June 8, 7:00 pm
Members $100, guests $125

Johnny Vinczencz was christened the Caribbean Cowboy during his tenure at South Beach’s Astor Place; he became known as the Guava Gaucho while overseeing the kitchen at De La Tierra in Delray Beach, Florida. His cuisine has been given names like New Floridian, Floribbean, and Nuevo Latino, among others. According to the modest Vinczencz, however, his cooking is simply “regional American.”

But the critics won’t let it go at that. “Vinczencz is stirring South Florida’s melting pot with intensity, bringing his bold, pure Caribbean flavors and fondness for smoke and barbecue to this latest stunner,” raved the Miami Herald’s Rochelle Koff in her four-star review of Johnny V. John Mariani of Wine Spectator wrote, “Vinczencz just skirts going over the top with his generosity. Yet everything on the plate is balanced, the way a circus acrobat can both dazzle you and show tremendous discipline at the same time.” Judith Stocks of SouthFlorida.com agreed, explaining, “What Vinczencz succeeds so beautifully at giving us is a stunning repertoire—part whimsical, part comfort food, and part sophistication.”

Once a dishwasher at the Ohio Sheraton, this St. Louis native first made a splash in South Florida as sous-chef of restaurateur Dennis Max’s Maxaluna and Max’s Grill, before moving on to Astor Place, where he garnered national attention and was called “a chef to keep your eye on” by Mariani in Esquire. Five years later, he took over the executive chef position at De La Tierra and its sister location at El Monte Sagrado in New Mexico. In December 2003 he set temperatures rising when he opened his own restaurant, Johnny V, on Las Olas Boulevard.

We’ll be toasting Vinczencz’s creations at the Beard House with Champagnes from Laurent-Perrier, the world’s largest family-run Champagne house. Overseen by cellar master Alain Terrier, Laurent-Perrier Champagnes are generally Chardonnay-driven and multivintage, resulting in crisp, fresh, elegant, and balanced blends that will pair perfectly with Vinczencz’s ebullient dishes.

Wednesday, June 4, 2003  7:00 p.m.
Members $85, guests $110

The prize possession of Johnny Vinczencz, executive chef of De La Tierra at Sundy House, is not his knife kit, his hulking stove, or his mega-BTUed salamander. In fact, his favorite thing can’t be found anywhere near his kitchen. Several miles away, amid lush tropical vegetation, is a five-acre kitchen garden, from which Vinczencz draws inspiration for his New Florida cuisine. He looks at the lychees, papayas, longans, jackfruits, and the tongue-twisting jaboticabas, and he sees dinner. As Jen Karetnick wrote in the Miami News Times, “He’s now such a freak for local and native fruits we could call him the Guava Gaucho.” (Not so incidentally, De La Tierra is Spanish for “of the earth.”)

Vinczencz’s “bold, fresh, Florida cuisine,” per John Tanasychuk of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, has led to glowing reviews. Tanasychuk, by the way, awarded the restaurant four stars. Karetnick christened Vinczencz “one of our finer chefs, destined for national attention.” At De La Tierra, she added, “Johnny V is doing his most galactic work to date.” And Vinczencz’s exuberant cuisine so impressed the South Florida gastroscenti that De La Tierra was named one of the area’s top three restaurants for 2002.

Vinczencz’s career started the old-fashioned way: washing dishes. Soon, he discovered his passion for cooking. For ten years he worked in all facets of the professional kitchen—from catering to banquets—and then he took a job with Dennis Max’s Unique Restaurant Concepts. From there he did turns at Maxaluna, Max’s Grille, and Astor Place Bar and Grill. At the last, he caught the attention of Esquire, which named him one of 1996’s chefs to watch.

This month, he is gearing up to open a Western outpost, El Monte Sagrado, in Taos, New Mexico. It’s a busy time, and he’s lucky to have a talented staff to rely on back home. De la Tierra chef de cuisine Dwayne Adams began his career at 13, and by age 19 was one of the youngest food production managers ever at the Marriott. In 1985, Adams met Vinczencz while the two worked for Restaurant Concepts. Vinczencz called on him while at Astor Place, then took him along to Sundy House. Pastry chef Malka Espinel also followed Vinczencz from Astor Place. A native of Colombia, she is a natural when it comes to preparing tropical fruits. Espinel graduated from the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago, then worked for Nick’s on Miami Beach. An internship at Fauchon in Paris followed, which inspired her to open her own patisserie in Colombia. But Espinel came to miss life in the States, so she returned to Florida, hooking up with Vinczencz at Sundy.

Thursday, June 28, 2001 7:00 P.M.
Members $85, guests $110

Here at the Beard Foundation, we can spout off fashionable new cuisines with the best of them—Progressive Cuisine, Nuevo Latino, French-Asian Fusion, Contemporary American, Mediterranean-Inflected-California Cuisine, etc., etc. But we’ve got to admit we were more than a little intrigued when we heard about chef Johnny Vinczencz’s self-styled "New Floridean Barbecue Cuisine." At the fashionable Art Deco Astor Place Bar & Grill in trendy South Beach, Vinczencz combines boyhood taste memories of the heartland where he grew up with the tropical flavors that have seduced him in his adopted South Florida home, and he does so with perfect culinary pitch. As the New Times put it when they nominated him to their Best of Miami list, "Caribbean cowboy chef Johnny Vinczencz is relent-lessly innovative, mercilessly creative, ruthlessly talented."

Like many a chef, Vinczencz got his start as a dishwasher. In his case, the job was at the local Sheraton Hotel, and he was a lad of 15. He graduated to a cooking job, then worked his way up the line and ultimately served a three-year apprenticeship with Ziggy Alespach, then the head of the Culinary Federation of America. For the next decade, Vinczencz crisscrossed the United States, working in the catering/banquet divisions at a number of Sheraton and Marriott hotels. He particularly enjoyed an assignment in Florida, and vowed to return one day. When that day came, he sought out celebrated New World Cuisine chef Norman Van Aken, then at a Mano, to be his mentor. Next, he moved on to Raleigh Blue Star, which he helped open. That job was followed by sous-chef stints at Maxaluna and Max’s Grille in Boca Raton. He came to the gorgeously restored Astor Place in 1995.

There, "the beautiful people give him standing ovations nightly," according to Restaurant Hospitality, which named him a rising star in 1997. One year earlier, Esquire had listed him as a "chef to keep your eye on." Vinczencz appeared on the cover of South Florida magazine, which called him "a culinary treasure." As for The Miami Herald, the headline of its review of Astor Place said it all: "Setting Divine, Flavors Sublime."