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Chef Tom Colicchio experimented with new combinations and flavors in his eight-course vintner dinner menu.

The dinner, in the works for months, came together within hours in the large, open kitchen of Bob and Karen Scott’s Port Royal home.

All the food traveled from New York City to Naples with Colicchio on Thursday, including large diver scallops, which measure a few inches across. He decided to lard the scallops and roast them, creating the dish for the first time Friday night.

The scallops, which were the second course, were served with mortadella, which Colicchio said is “like Italian bologna,” and caramelized fennel.

The fennel was the first item Colicchio and his assistants, Chefs Damon Wise and Andy Fortgang, started cooking in Naples. It was on the stove at about 2:30 p.m. Friday at a very low heat.

Just moments before the guests sat down to dinner in the Scotts’ dining room, Colicchio and his assistants were relaxed and well-organized. He divides ingredients by course ahead of time to make the job easier and more efficient, Colicchio said.

The china for the first course was laid out in three neat rows on the counter and two long pieces of marinated hamachi were on a cutting board ready for slicing.

Cooking in someone else’s kitchen is often a challenge, but not in the Scotts’ house, said Colicchio, who has known Bob Scott for about 20 years.

“I’m so happy to have Tom in my kitchen for our first dinner,” Karen said Thursday just after Colicchio arrived from New York. “He’s like family.”

On Friday morning, Karen folded pieces of gold silk into 24 cream-colored linen napkins for the place settings on her tables. She chose the design herself.

At around noon Friday, April Wood of Grace Lake’s Florist in Naples arrived armed with boxes of flowers, vases, candles and tablecloths.

“It takes a team of people for an event like this,” said Karen, who was bustling around as the florists set up the flowers.

Bunches of peach amaryllis, blue hydrangea and cymbidium orchids clustered on the three tabletops in the dining rooms, with little bumble bees resting on the petals in honor of the dinner’s theme, “Bees to Honey.” Twenty-four place settings circled the tables for the vintners, hosts and guests.

Gift bags filled with an autographed Colicchio cookbook, a book on cheese, French cheese knives and Naples honey were neatly lined up in the foyer, along with wrapped gifts for the vintners.

When the guests arrived around 6:30 p.m., they filled the kitchen and the lanai, and a few trickled outside to the candle-lit pool deck overlooking Buccaneer Bay.

It was Kathleen Fleming and Jeffery Davis’ first wine festival event, and they were enjoying themselves thoroughly, they said.

“We’ve heard so much and read so much about the festival that we just wanted to experience it for ourselves,” Fleming said. “It’s for such a good cause.”

Fleming and Davis stood in awe as magician Bill Herz put on a show with a deck of playing cards.

Herz asked Colicchio, who was taking a break from the kitchen, to choose a non-face card from the deck and to write on it with a blue permanent marker. The magician then shuffled the deck.

Somehow, that card Colicchio marked ended up inside a sealed envelope in the zippered pocket of a wallet inside Herz’s jacket pocket.

Fleming laughed and clapped her hands when Herz produced the card.

“Amazing!” Davis said. “Did you see that?”

Colicchio laughed with the guests and then turned back to his ingredients to work his own brand of magic.

The most unique items on the menu were the Waygu beef flown in from Japan and the white truffles, he said. The beef, which he purchased for $74 per pound, is very tender because it is very fatty, he said. The white truffle, which is a pungent-smelling subterranean fungus, was difficult to find because it’s almost out of season and costs about $1,300 per pound, Colicchio said.

Each course was matched with wine from Lail Vineyards in Northern California and Castello Banfi in Montalcino, Italy. Colicchio arranged the food and the wine from light to heavy, because it’s easier on the palate, he said.

“Wine is almost like ketchup,” Colicchio said. “It’s a condiment. It should complement the food.”