When Hank Charcuterie chef de cuisine Juan Carlos Tovar-Ballagh passed away last November, he left behind a small library of notebooks brimming with recipe ideas that he would never make.

“Jay,” the quietly ambitious, imaginative young man who started his culinary career as a line cook at Pachamamas and later helped transform Hank Charcuterie from a small artisanal butcher shop into a “full-fledged restaurant,” was just 27.

On Thursday, a group of Tovar-Ballagh’s friends and colleagues will finally bring some of his notebook musings to life in “Jay’s Dinner,” a six-course meal benefiting Just Food.

Slated for 6:30 p.m. at Sarah’s Upstairs, 927 ½ Massachusetts St., the event will feature several high-profile members of the Lawrence dining scene, including Ken Baker and Brian Strecker of the now-closed Pachamamas, Rick Martin of Limestone Pizza Kitchen and Bar, Zach Thompson of 715, and Vaughn Good and Jamie Everett of Hank Charcuterie.

“We took our dish and tried to make it as close to what we thought Jay would do,” says Good, chef-owner of Hank Charcuterie. “How he would plate it, how he would cook it.”

The resulting menu includes such delicacies as beer-brined chicken confit and kimchi-wrapped beef neck dumplings.

Despite his late friend’s introverted nature, Good suspects Tovar-Ballagh wouldn’t have minded the big, fancy dinner in his name — “I think he’d like it,” Good says. After his death last year, the Tovar-Ballagh family asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Just Food.

“Jay was an insanely creative person,” Good says. “He had a ton of thoughts and ideas that he just didn’t get to do yet, and I think that was the best way that we could remember Jay or pay tribute to him — to let some of these things come to life that he didn’t get to do.”

Tickets to “Jay’s Dinner” cost $75, or $45 for those who work in the restaurant industry, and can be purchased at www.justfoodks.org/jaysdinner.