Eat! Vancouver is back! It’s a food and cooking festival featuring products and restaurant in the city. It’s on this weekend and costs $16 for an adult. There’s tons of vendors, competitions, samples and of course … celebrity chefs!
It is located at the Vancouver Convention Centre West (the new convention centre near the Olympic cauldron). There’s so many vendors that I can’t even cover in this post because there are soooo many.
There so many vendors from yogurt to dips. Yummy yummy samples!
Island Farms was selling ice cream for $1. Jack Links had a booth too and they were giving away packages of jerky!
Mc Donalds was my favorite. They were giving out samples of their lattes, vanilla lattes, and iced mocha. The iced mocha is SO cute and tasted really good!!
There were chips + dips as well as crackers and breads.
From flavoured soy drinks to raw vegetables. A few vendors were selling their products at a discount and is quite worth the deals.
Motts was there giving out samples of their beverages and selling full containers for $1.
Since the Canucks were playing at the same time as Eat! Vancouver, they even had a large TV screen. People were about to have heart attacks watchings…so many “ohhhh”, “yeahhhhh”, “noooo” and (insert screaming noises) were heard from the crowd.
Bonchaz was there selling mini Bonchaz for $0.50. I had their mini chocolate Bonchaz and having them fresh out of the oven is so goood!
Donnelly Group had some pretty damn good samples! Small drinks and small appies.
Food Network hosted a celebrity stage!
Graham Kerr (The Galloping Gourmet) was there! Honestly I don’t really know who he is but he is famous for being a food and culinary TV personality. He looked familiar to me, but it’s probably because I saw him on Rachel Ray’s show.
Connie DeSousa,Top Chef Canada Contender was there as well. She is a co-owner of Charcut Roast House in Calgary and she was giving a demo on stuffing a pigs head. The pigs head was freaky! She even skinned it!
The main reason I was at Eat Vancouver was to volunteer for the CCFCC National Chefs Competition. I was there with my friend to help CCFCC tweet and blog. We basically observed the contestants cooking and looked cool in our chef jackets. Honestly, I am sure both of us are not very good cooks at all. A few people approached us asking which cooking school we came from, but we are proud to be SFU students.
There were 8 different chefs from around Canada were competing and it was super cool watching them do their thing! It was like watching Food Network Challenge, but in real life.
They made some AMAZING FOOD! SUPER AMAZING! I even got a chance to share a few plates with the other volunteers and man, this was good food. Too bad it cost the attendees $100 to eat a 3 course meal from the competition.
There were even some judges rating all the food that each contestent created.
Another cool section of Eat Vancouver was the “Bite of Vancouver Restaurants”. You can buy sheets of tickets to be used to redeem food from a few restaurants. The tickets were 10 tickets for $5 of $10 for 20. Clearly I went for the 20 tickets! Most restaurant items cost between 4 – 8 tickets.
Calabash Bistro was there serving up a few of their dishes.
Dona Cata Mexican Food there as well. They have some good tacos.
EBO had a booth too and they had items similar to the ones that they had at the Foodie Feast.
For 4 tickets I got the Peanut Butter Chocolate Bar which has passion fruit gelee on top. It is also served with a bit of peanut butter Ice cream! The Vanilla Berry Mocktail comes with it! The add dry ice to it, so it creates the bubbly, smokey effect.
Gerard Lounge
Fishworks
Goldilocks was there too and they are known for their amazing desserts.
Gorilla Food is known for their all vegan menu items.
Gramercy Grill
New India Buffet
Maurya Indian Cuisine
Milestones was there too.
Mochikas Peruvian Cafe
Yummmm
Organic Lives
There was a lot to do. If you actually take your time to go to every single booth to take a look, it won’t make it seem like you wasted your time and money going here.
There is also a 19+ area where all the alcohol companies were located. Since I was volunteering, I didn’t think it would be right for me to be seen sipping on a few samples of beer since I have the “asian glow”. I turn beet red when I did a little bit. (So sad 🙁 )
Eat Vancouver is still open on Saturday (10am – 9pm) and Sunday (10am – 5pm)! More exciting activities are gonna be happening as well!
Friday was not that busy, but Saturday is supposed to be super busy and packed.
More info here: http://www.eat-vancouver.com/
