• DREIM WILL NOT BE ON FF TEAM THIS THANKSGIVING •

-Marina del Rey, Ca.
-It's official.

With the 2012 Feast Fest Official Roll Call of Chefs complete, Stephen Dreim will not be a member of the squad, and a virulent anti-Dreim movement among chefs could quell talks for a 2013 rehiring during the offseason.

Scouters fired off four separate deals Monday, the amounts of which were not publicly released, but Anna Milk, a scooter working on the Dreim case, said that the first two were 4-year deals, the third was a 5-year deal, and the fourth was a 6-year deal, and that one was staggered. Dreim rejected the first two deals, "contemplated" and then rejected the third, and was in the middle of "contemplating" a fourth when the roll call commenced and time ran out.

"We are extremely disappointed about the way negotiations with Mr. Dreim have gone, and we hope we will be able to come to a deal when the offseason recommences come December," so said Head Scouter Jim Dall. Dall added, "[Rehiring Dreim] will be the first task on our agenda when the next offseason begins."

But not if the chefs have their way. Chefs failed to get scouters to agree to a pact requiring Dreim to be placed on the barred list and threatening mass resignations and salary raise requests should this not occur. They can forget about the pact for the time being, as the chefs have scored a hollow-chocolate victory with the deadline passing and voiding negotiations, but the chefs will have to come back to the bargaining table with the scouters if they don't want negotiations with Dreim to rejuice themselves in 2013. "This is only half the battle," said Peter Dumas, who co-wrote the pact accusing Dreim of being rude, conceited, and threatening to his colleagues in his four years on the Feast Fest floor. 44 of the 65 chefs signed the pact.

A few of Dreim's allies on the Feast Fest squad were disappointed by the deadline passing. "Steve was a terrific chef and a great colleague who I loved working with on the Feast Fest floor, and it beats me where these totally unfounded accusations of threats and haughtiness are coming from," said one chef who declined to give his game for fear of being "chewed out" by the large anti-Dreim majority.

"While we support continued unemployment of Dreim in terms of Feast Fest," said Dumas, "we understand that a minority does exist in support of Dreim, and we must cooperate with and continue forging our positive relationships with those who do support Dreim in order to avoid a harmful splintering into factions and/or a polarization among our glorious body of Feast Fest chefs."

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Merrsff to Receive "Lifetime Achievement Award" from NCA at Feast Fest

-Setauket, N.Y.
-Lindbergh Merrssff will receive a special "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the NCA as part of Feast Fest opening ceremonies, Manager William Vanderbilt announced late Sunday. Merrssff claimed to be "ecstatic" here at his home in Setauket, a Long Island beach town.

Merrssff will be the Guest of Honor for Feast Fest 2012 and will be the recipient of the Ceremonial Turkey. Merrssff has received various accolades from Feast Fest and the NCA in his retirement. In addition, Merrssff was honored with a Feast Fest "Lifetime Achievement Award" during Feast Fest XV (2009), but this is the first time he will be honored with such an award by the significantly larger domain of the NCA.

"Mr. Merrssff is a spectacular and extraordinary chef whose life and whose work has embodied and continues to embody everything we here at the NCA stand for," said NCA President Al Green.

He will be presented with the award as part of Opening Ceremonies for Feast Fest.






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With Two Days Left, Saturday Is Day of Lost Time in Dreim Case

-Marina del Rey, Ca.
-You might as well stick a fork in this one and serve it for dinner, because the negotiations with Stephen Dreim and Feast Fest scouters are about to be hunted down by the evil forces of, well, time.

Dreim and FF must reach a deal by midday Monday, when the official 2012 Feast Fest Roll Call will take place. The Roll Call will officially set out the roster for Feast Fest 2012, and once the roll call begins, no further chefs can be signed to the event. (Well, technically, they can be, but they wouldn't be able to serve in Feast Fest until Feast Fest 2013.)

Dreim rejected a $775,000 deal Saturday, making scouters realize they need to focus on time, rather than money, in their next offer, which they filed at $778,500 over three years late Saturday night. Dreim has yet to reply.

"It became clear that one big turnoff for Mr. Dreim in our offers was that they were all temporary, one-year deals, and the possibility of launching right back into intensive negotiations such as these after Feast Fest was clearly unappealing to Mr. Dreim," said Jim Roedde, the scouter heading the team of scouters tasked with working on Dreim's case. "Our newest deal will ensure we won't have to negotiate with Mr. Dreim again until 2015, and we hope this will illicit a better reaction from Mr. Dreim."

Scouters hope to engage in a back-in-forth with Dreim on Sunday, exchanging rapid fire offers and reactions in hopes of getting one to stick to the wall for a deal. However, if Dreim continues to take a long time to make up his mind about each deal, that setup could prove impossible.

Dreim resigned Oct. 18, enraged upon being implicated in a scouter bribery scandal for which he was later exonerated. Scouters set out to rehire Dreim, but ran into complications with a defiant, stubborn Dreim in negotiations and with a chef body who called Dreim haughty and conceited and which filed a pact recently to try to stop the negotiations.






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More Maintenance

Maintenance will be performed on the FF Ticketing Hotline Sunday from 9amP/12pmE to 2pmP/5pmE.



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Crellas Wins Most Diverse

-New York
-The inaugural winner of a brand new NCA yearly award is a Feast Fest chef.

The NCA's new "Most Diverse" honor, created to dole out each year "to the chef who best exemplifies a spirit of global flavor and international incorporation in his/her cooking," was won Saturday night by FFer Laelech Crellas, a Hawaii-based World chef with Hawaiian, Polynesian, German, British, Japanese, Indonesian, and Irish ancestries. "I am ecstatic to receive the very first 'Most Diverse' honor," Crellas said in an email.






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Dreim Rejects $770K Offer, Scouters Offer $775K

-Marina del Rey, Ca.
-Feast Fest scouters filed a $770,000, one-year, 2013-option offer for Stephen Dreim early Friday, which the resigned-on-Oct. 18 phenom immediately rejected.

Scouters then filed a $775,000 deal, and are awaiting word from Dreim on that offer.

"If increasing the amounts of the offers don't work, we're going to try increasing their length," said Jim Dall, Head Scouter of Feast Fest. The $775,000 offer is also a one-year deal with a 2013 option.

Dall Friday removed Stefanie McOneguew from the position as head of the team of scouters negotiating with Dreim. This is because Dall felt McOneguew was siding with the interests of the FF chefs, who do not want Dreim to return, and that she thus was purposely "failing to push the negotiations to their fullest possible extent." Dall said, "Ms. McOneguew does not understand that this is not about the chefs. Once Dreim resigned, I issued an ultimatum to my scouters: We need Dreim. Get him back. Disregard any and all other potential factors. Ms. McOneguew was failing to meet that ultimatum." Dall announced midday Friday that Jim Roedde, a former Head Scouter in 2009 who stepped down to become a regular scouter in 2010, had been designated as the official head of the team working with Dreim.

Chefs, who call Dreim "haughty, conceited, and barbarous" and "an absolute displeasure to have collaborated with" are on their way to victory: if Dreim has not been rehired by the Monday roll call of chefs for Feast Fest 2012, the official deadline to hire chefs for that very year, negotiations will automatically be voided.

"Time is running out," Dall said. "We need to make moves, serious, well-thought-out moves that emphasize the demands of the chef, and we need to make them now."






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Dreim Rejects $764K Offer, Scouters Plan to Issue New Offer

-Marina del Rey, Ca.
-Only three days remain to re-sign Stephen Dreim to an FF contract for 2012, and unravelings on Thursday zapped even more life out of the feasibility of the negotiations.

After eight days of silence on a $764,000 offer issued Tue., Oct. 30, Dreim finally came out and rejected the offer, as was expected. "There's a psychological pattern, where, if people are taking a long time to make a decision, they're more likely to say 'no' to it," said analyst Mike Vilshire. "Because if they like the offer, they'll usually say 'yes' enthusiastically and quickly." Dreim set no further request for an offer, which is both good and bad for the scouters. It's good in that it gives them more freedom to post their own amount in the next offer, not one dictated by Dreim, but the lack of an offer request, which Dreim has usually issued upon previous rejections, deprives the scouters of guidance in the form of a ballpark figure.

Head Scouter Jim Dall said he and his scouters had not yet figured an amount to offer Dreim, but he said that it "will not exceed $800,000." The offer will be formally issued on Friday. "Our battle plan is to see this offer off and away Friday, hopefully we get a response awfully quickly, and then we hope, if Mr. Dreim is responding quickly, to engage in a rapid-fire tennis-style back-and-forth of offers and responses over Saturday and Sunday until either we reach an agreement or until the Monday deadline passes. Hopefully, the former of those two scenarios will play out."

In other news, chefs met with scouters for five hours on Thursday in an attempt to break off talks between the scouters and Dreim, but with the deadline looming that's not a must-do in order for the chefs' goal of not rehiring Dreim to be achieved. "Time is on our side," said chef Peter Dumas Thursday.

However, if the chefs could get the scouters to agree to the pact, the pact's terms would involve having the scouting department place Dreim on the barred list. If the chefs drop the pact matter and just let the deadline pass, Dreim could still be negotiated with in the next offseason. While most chefs agreed that letting Monday come and go would be a victory for their cause, a few disagreed. "We must settle this matter now and get the scouters to agree with this pact," so said chef Alizone Jahschweich. "I don't know about the other chefs, but I can say that I don't want to be refighting this come December, January, February, 2013, 2014, 2015, ever. I want to get Dreim on the barred list. And I never want to have to refight that."

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