BMW Group and Eckart Witzigmann launch the first culinary symposium in Vienna
Munich.The BMW Group and star chef Eckart Witzigmann are expanding their joint commitment to culinary arts, conscious enjoyment and social responsibility: In the eighth year of cooperation, in addition to awarding the renowned international Eckart Witzigmann Prize, the ECKART culinary symposium will take place for the first time. “The product is the star” – this is the motto of the one-day event, which will take place on 20 May 2019 at the Schönbrunn Orangery and will provide information about the many aspects of good food. Market stalls with selected products from all over Austria and the international Alpine region will tempt visitors to put new knowledge into practice.
“Our partnership with the Eckart Academy is based on the common goal of promoting healthy nutrition, sustainable cuisine and the responsible use of resources,” says Dr. Nicolas Peter, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, Finance, and patron of ECKART. “With the ECKART culinary symposium, we are creating a modern format, with which we want to address a broader audience.”
Eckart Witzigmann explains the idea behind the symposium: “Sustainability, quality and responsibility in nutrition have always been important to me. But what does that mean in concrete terms for everyone? With the symposium, we want to establish a platform and gain more attention and broad impact. Our goal is to help good, responsibly-prepared food achieve a breakthrough. Together with the BMW Group, we are developing and promoting ideas to ensure that something really changes.”
Under the title “The product is the star – grounding the avant-garde”, the ECKART culinary symposium #1 is dedicated to the questions: What is good food? Is there good food without a guilty conscience? Do labels such as organic, seasonal or regional help consumers? “It is more important to cook for yourself than to just eat well from time to time,” says Eckart Witzigmann. The first ECKART culinary symposium evaluates answers in theory and practice, in small workshops or discussion rounds with exciting personalities from the gastronomy scene. The orientation of this exploration is Witzigmann’s oft-quoted and rarely implemented credo: “The product is the star.” “Viennese Cuisine” and the “Culinary Heritage of the Alps” with a producers’ market provide illustrative material for the first answers. Eckart Witzigmann adds: “The greatest thing for a gastronome has always been to know his producers. To be able to tell them what was good and what wasn’t so good and which products you would like to have.”
Additional information and tickets for the event can be found here.