Escoffier On Line

On Monday and Tuesday had the pleasure of attending The International Restaurant & Foodservice Show of New York.  It was a great show and I would recommend it highly to anyone in the business.  There was an energy at the show I have not seen in the past few years.  Every vendor I spoke to said that they were having a very good show, much better than last year, and one even said it was the best show they had had in 7 years.  If restaurateurs are spending money that means they are making money, this is great news for all of us!

There were a couple of solid themes throughout the show. Green, Green, Green.  I felt like it was St Patrick’s Day already.  All of the container manufacture had their own spin on bio degradable or even compostable packages and even plates. All the chemical folks have gone Green and you saw the word sustainable all over the place.  The Green Restaurant Association was there in force.  They have teamed up with the NYRA (New York Restaurant Association) to be a one stop shop to make your restaurant truly Green compliant.  There are a lot of benefits to this; a big one being the potential to put more green in your pocket, otherwise the NYRA would not be endorsing them.

The seminars were great this year as well.  I attended several including the technology related ones. Two really stood out- Creative Strategies for Restaurants to Attract Customers using Social Media by Dave Evans and Tom Jaffee and 5 Must-Know Factors for Successful Email Marketing by Boris Bugarski.  They were both very informative and Boris’s talk was outstanding.  He crammed more information into 60 minutes than I could believe.  As the CEO & President of mUrgent, which handles E-Mail marketing for over 12000 restaurants and food related businesses, he didn’t hawk his wares but instead gave away all his trade secrets and was very entertaining as well.  There was even a standing ovation at the end of his presentation. (In jest he did ask for it, but he did get and deserve it!)  I’ll be putting together a synopsis of both in the next week or two.

An other big part of the show was the Japan Pavilion.  Dozens of booths featuring Japanese food, beverage and products. Some of the most beautiful knives I have ever seen (one for the bargain price of $5800, but they were giving a 15% discount).  The food ranged from some really gnarly highly manufactured tasting chicken balls to the most delicious tofu I have ever tasted, from Azix Inc.  Doing tasting here took a little bit of courage but often paid off but sometines ended up discretely place in a napkin in the trash.  Besides the tofu I really liked the kanpachi, a sustainable frozen fish product from the Tarumizu City Fisherman's Cooperative that had a clean fresh fish taste and a firm but tender texture.

There were several competitions- US Pastry Competition, Ultimate Barista Challenge  and the U.S. Pizza Team Trials.  More on these later but I just have to say the U.S. Pizza Team Trials  was just plain wacky.  A bunch of guys break dancing with phony pizza rounds, I don’t get it, guess I’m just getting old.

Check back for more, I got lots of pix and a couple of videos from the show and will be posting several articles over the next couple of weeks.
Cheers,
G