On 21st June, Guia Oleo and Buenos Aires Delivery brought together the top restaurants in the city, offering guests a culinary world tour that spanned from Indian samosas to Japanese Sushi to Southern US barbequed chicken wings.
Arepas from Caracas (Photo: Lauren White)
“We put together a list of our top 50 restaurants, who we knew we’d love to have, and just went from there,” said co-founder of Buenos Aires Delivery, Cori Allen.
In total 26 restaurants came together to feed the expected 2,000 at the event called Taste!
“We had one last October and we had 700 people show up,” says Allen. “We realised how much people love free food.”
Three long isles packed full of sushi boats, sizzling stews, and cup cake liners filled with the perfect bite-sized samples awaited guests as they packed in to the tiny banquet hall.
There was moist organic zucchini bread, Venezuelan corn bread smothered in cheese, deep dish pizza, New Orleans red bean Creole stew, draft beer, spicy hot sauces, fried pita chips with the most delicious red pepper spread, Mexican style tacos, rows upon rows of sushi, five different kinds of chicken wings, flaky samosas and all vegan burgers, and that was all before the dessert isle.
Fresh-baked blueberry pies with whipped cream, all-natural vanilla frozen yogurt with fresh strawberries and a velvet smooth chocolate mousse topped off the perfect buffet.
“The food was fantastic,” said fellow food taster Orla Treacy. There was no doubt that was the general consensus as people lined up pushing and shoving to get to the front of the vendors’ tables.
NOLA Chef serving up red beans and rice to a hungry crowd. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)
The event was organised so that each person was given a booklet upon entering the banquet hall. Whenever they sampled food from a vendor they had to put a ticket into the box at that table. When you were out of tickets, it was time to leave. However, with all the food and drink swirling around no one wanted to leave.
One of the organising tables collapsed under the weight of the throngs of people at the door and the few garbage’s that were present were filling up faster than they were being emptied leaving some spilling onto the floor.
But to the vendors the massive herds were much more of a benefit than a nuisance.
“One of the main reasons for coming here was to get my name out there to people who are interested in food,” said 28-year-old independent pastry chef Kelly Poindexter.
The event gave all the chefs and restaurant owners an excellent chance to showcase their food and get their name out into the public.
Overall Taste! was an absolutely delicious evening but with its current success rate it’s probably time for a bigger venue.
The event was a great idea but the amount of people that attended made it go out of hand. There was no organization at all once inside, and eventually people were just grabbing food from the tables, tickets or not.
This needs not only a bigger venue, but some sort of line on each vendor so tasters can circulate
You forgot to mention the peruvian food restaurant, they were great.
Better than Venezuela bread that in my opinion was terrible.
Hi Gustavo, thanks for coming to Taste! We know it wasn’t perfect but we had fun, learned a lot, and are already planning ways to make the next Taste even more successful. Nos vemos!