The aspect that it’s most often those on death row who know for sure about their last meal led to a collaboration with Prisoner Winery that became a food and wine pairing that celebrated life and making the most of it while we can.

The dinner party was part of the Chef’s Plated series that the Cura team puts on once a month for a small, lucky group of residents at Aberdeen. 

“We have a group of residents that are looking for an ‘ultra-premium’ dining experience, and our teams are blessed to have the opportunity to deliver it for them,” Grotha says. “The Prisoner Wine Pairing Dinner is our seventh installment in the series. It’s a plated dinner that usually consists of six to ten courses and is one that our team can provide that rivals any fine dining establishment in the state.”

Seating is limited to about a dozen diners, and even though the cost is extra, these dinners sell out in minutes flat.

The dinners are held in an intimate setting in the private dining room, and Grotha finds it’s an event that “showcases the talents and abilities of the entire department.” And the team goes all out. For Sunday’s dinner, both black and white truffles were flown in overnight from Italy; tomahawk ribeyes were on deck and pasta was made from scratch.

These dinners also allow the culinary team to use ingredients and techniques that wouldn’t normally scale for regular dining, Grotha says.

“It’s been such an educational opportunity for our team because it allows us to feature ingredients that we would otherwise not have available to us and serve in a style that our team doesn’t have the chance to do every night,” he says. “My culinarians are growing and getting more proficient in their skill sets at an incredible rate because they are learning, being challenged, and getting excited about the work that they do. Most importantly, the residents are the benefactors of our ‘pushing the envelope’ of what we can do as a team.”