Special Culinary Guests Join Forest & Forage!
We are thrilled to announce special guests Chef Iulian Fortu and Sam Fitz are joining Forest & Forage! Iulian and Sam are trekking up from their culinary home base in Washington D.C. to join Pete Uzzell in the kitchen for an extra special Forager’s Dinner. Both Iulian and Sam come from the forage-focused DC restaurant Poplar, where Iulian is Executive Chef and Sam is President. Chef Iulian’s past in forage-focused restaurants will bring an extra exciting flavor to this years event. We look forward to the tasty collaboration between him and chef Pete!
Tickets are still available for our food and foraging event on July 19th – 20th. Event including guided foraging hikes, skills sessions, overnight at the hut and all meals. Explore the full event and buy your tickets here!
Iulian Fortu – Executive Chef
Iulian Fortu is the Executive Chef at Poplar restaurant in Washington, DC. Iulian has a lifelong passion for food, which he loves to share with others through workshops, foraging walks, cooking classes, and private dinners. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, he spent a summer working at the acclaimed Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, and also trained at the Puglia Culinary Centre in southern Italy. He has been a speaker and instructor for such organizations as the Willowsford Conservancy, the Mycological Association of Washington and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. A professional forager, Iulian is purveyor to many notable fine restaurants in DC, including Reverie, Oyster Oyster, Bresca, and The Dabney.
Sam Fitz – President of ANXO Cider and restaurant Poplar
Sam oversees production for ANXO Cider, a Mid-Atlantic based cidery making dry cider from apples the way winemakers make wine from grapes. Sam’s ciders are naturally sugar-free and showcase the amazing fruit growing regions of the Mid-Atlantic, where he sources all of ANXO’s fruit from. Sam is also an avid forager, collecting hundreds of pounds of wild mushrooms annually with his daughter Willow and dog Tavi. Though he is not a Chef, Sam has showcased phenomenal ingredients throughout his two decades in the restaurant industry, and now oversees operations for Poplar, a foraged-focused restaurant that opened in Washington, DC this year under forager and Chef Iulian Fortu.