Wining and Dining for the Arts

A few weeks ago (ok a month ago now) I got tickets for the grand tasting at the Albany wine and dine for the arts festival as an early birthday present for Matt. This was a GREAT event!

Tasting the drinks!

 It was essential an expo type thing with a lot of local restaurants giving out food samples and a lot of local and national wine, beer and liquor companies giving out drink samples. We arrived a few minutes after it started and it was jam packed with people as everyone stopped at the first few tables near the door. Once we moved past the mob it was a little better.

We got to try a lot of really delicious food mainly from places we had never been to (and a few we had, like New World Bistro yum). Pretty much everything we tried we really good food wise, and we even got a lot of coupons from the restaurants to entice us and we'll be visiting some of them soon :-) Drink wise it was also great, lots of local wine to try but I was somewhat distracted by the super delicious strawberry mojitos the Bacardi man made for me!

Tequila time

In addition to all the food and drink, we found out about an hour before the end of the event that they had a chef "chopped-like" competition going on downstairs. We caught the end of the second round and watched the third and final round. They had 45 minutes to make an appetizer and main course with certain ingredients, including crawfish, squid and quail (and some others I can't remember). I was a lot of fun watching! It was hard to see exactly what they were making (but the MC and chefs were very interactive) but it all smelt amazing!

Cook, cook, cook

It turned out that the winner came from the round we watched (Gio, on the left in the above picture). He gets to cook at the event banquet next year. It was quite amusing watching the photographer getting all 6 chefs to pose!

The chefs

The next weekend we walked into Fin, our local fishmonger (which is fabulous and all Albany fish lovers need to visit) and Gio the chef who won was buying fish! The owners knew he was a chef as he was offering to do some cooking classes there but they didn't know about his wine and dine for the arts win so we enlightened them. Does this make us foodies?! Apologies for the not good pictures, but I forgot my camera so they are all phone pics.

Highly recommend this event to all food and drink lovers in the area! Now back to making my bread...

A horrible picture of us