Idle gossip is so beside the point at events celebrating food. So at Food & Wine magazine’s party Tuesday night, no one was speculating about when those cute newlyweds Bobby Flay and Stephanie March will start a family, or how well rested the chef of the Modern, Gabriel Kreuther, looks for someone at the helm of the hottest restaurant in town. No, guests were too busy stuffing their mouths with food to say much of anything.

The hosts of the party, however, had something to talk about. Food & Wine’s editor in chief, Dana Cowin, and its publisher, Julie McGowan, gushed about the magazine’s 2005 Best New Chefs in America. Good thing the guests weren’t paying too much attention, or they would have been upset to learn that only one chef from New York made the list: Shea Gallante, whose Greenwich Village bistro is an oenophile’s dream come true, with 65,000 bottles from which to choose.

That means that checking out the other culinary up-and-comers will require travel: to Austin, to sample Tyson Cole’s fare at Uchi; to Minneapolis, for a meal at Seth Bixby Daugherty’s Cosmos; to Kansas City, for Colby Garrelt’s bluestem, and other who-would-have-thunk-it cities such as Washington and Boulder.

But back to the party at Skylight, a bright-white event space on Hudson Street, where chefs, waiters, and culinary students eagerly fed the youngish crowd. Did we mention tastings at parties have no calories? That must be why Anita Low’s spareribs disappeared so quickly, as did the goat-filled tortellini by Andrew Carmellini of Cafe Boulud. And that’s why after a couple of hours of dinner, people still had room for dessert: banana pot stickers, s’more tarts (gourmet chocolate tarts topped with slightly melted marshmallows), and miniature ice-cream sundaes served in round chocolate shells.

To aid digestion, the disc jockey for “The Ellen Degeneres Show,” Tony Okungbowa, spun familiar, danceable tunes from the 1980s – but no one danced; everybody was eating.

Among the crowd were the chef of Les Halles, Anthony Bourdain; the chef of L’Impero, Scott Conant; one of our favorite bartenders in the city, Violera Jimenez, who can be found at Pace on Saturday nights, and one of our favorite catering servers in the city, Cherie Schnekenburger, who has recently finished her master’s thesis in art history on Marco Boschini’s 700-page poem on art criticism.