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A spread of dishes from a recent Euterra dinner (Photo by Tim Roebuck, Reveal Photo)
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Lori and Corey Bullock of the pop-up series Euterra
Corey Bullock grew up in the woods. Barefoot and happy, he roamed the dense thickets around Petersburg, hunting for everything and nothing in particular, tearing and sniffing his way to an education in native plants.
“I just stayed in the woods all the time,” Bullock says. “I would drop my book bag at the door and go into the woods — fishing, turning over rocks and catching crawfish, gigging frogs.” For the 31-year-old chef behind the recently debuted Euterra pop-up series, these woods are where his inspiration grows wild.
Taking place in Old Towne Petersburg this weekend, Euterra’s third pop-up event will reflect Bullock’s hometown roots. After the original seating on Saturday, Aug. 7, sold out, a Sunday-night dinner was also added (now sold out as well) to accommodate the level of interest, especially from people in the service industry.
The multicourse dinner will be served at one long communal table, and the menu won't be revealed to guests until the last course has been served. Bullock says keeping it a secret until then helps diners keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions. It's also a move that parallels the journey of investigation and discovery that epitomizes Bullock’s process of menu creation based on the ingredients he’s able to find.
A self-described "late bloomer," Bullock took the long way around to the kitchen, and to date, he’s only worked in three — Aziza’s on Main, Maple & Pine, and Longoven — but that hasn’t stopped chefs like Johnny Spero of Washington, D.C.'s Reverie, and Iliana Regan, a Michelin-starred Chicago chef and restaurateur, from taking notice. After Bullock held pop-ups at The Broken Tulip in 2019, both acclaimed chefs reached out to him, Spero to reserve a table at the next pop-up and Regan to offer him an opportunity to cook together.
Bullock began his career as a mixed-media artist, working with wood and metal and blowing glass. Friends encouraged Bullock and wife Lori to move to Houston to pursue architecture, but the couple quickly realized that the city and long hours behind a desk weren’t the right fit. After returning to Petersburg, Bullock decided to try his hand at cooking, joining the team at Aziza’s under chef Kyle Cox. Bullock says there was a continuity to his days there — working with fire in the mornings while blowing glass and cooking over fire in the evenings by Aziza’s wood-fired bread and pizza oven. “It just meshed really well, and I fell in love with it,” he says.
Most recently, Bullock was the executive sous chef at Longoven, where he was recruited by chef and co-owner Patrick Phelan, who had attended the second Euterra pop-up. With a fermentation lab at home, Bullock quickly bonded with fellow Longoven chef and co-owner Andrew Manning over a shared respect for the wild art of fermentation. Bullock was originally brought on to lead Longoven’s fermentation program, but 2020 had other plans, and in the early summer, he left the kitchen at Longoven to cook alongside Iliana Regan at Milkweed Inn, an engagement that was years in the making.
Back from the inn and charged with the renewed energy that comes from working with kindred spirits, Corey and his wife began planning future Euterra dinners. The term Euterra is meant to evoke the feeling of being at one with nature, the euphoria that comes from a feeling of togetherness with the living world — the essence of what Bullock is trying to put on the plate.
Euterra is, in many ways, a one-man show, but Lori plays an important role, from inspiration to execution. Together for the past 14 years, Corey and Lori were childhood friends who fell in love, and their deep connection is apparent; they don’t have to finish each other’s sentences because they seem to know what the other is thinking already. Though Lori modestly downplays her role in the pop-ups, Corey insists that her influence is bigger than she lets on. In addition to making many of the unique serving pieces by hand, Lori suggests ingredient pairings and is game to tackle any foraged materials Corey happens to drag home, like a mountain of cattails yanked from a swap. “We feed off each other very well,” says Lori, who also works as a stained glass artist.
At the dinners this weekend there will likely be several ingredients that diners haven’t experienced before. At the last pop-up, for example, Bullock created a sycamore bark cookie using the inner bark of the tree, which he ground into flour before combining with sycamore sap and a wild hazelnut, served on sycamore bark. “Everything on the dish,” he explains, “was conceptualized around that tree and served with that tree.” While the menu is a tightly guarded secret, Euterra’s Instagram hints at some of the elements of this dinner, like a cicada condiment inspired by XO sauce.
As for the future of Euterra, Bullock says owning a brick-and-mortar restaurant isn’t the goal. Instead, he wants to create an environment where guests can truly appreciate the connections between land and food — maybe at a bed-and-breakfast in the Great Smoky Mountains or on a foray-picnic in the Appalachians.
“We live in one of the most biodiverse regions on earth,” Bullock says. “It’s a whole other world when you cross that border into the mountains,” and that’s exactly the world he’d like to explore through Euterra.
Follow Euterra on Instagram for future pop-up announcements.
