Update: Iron Chef Finale

Chefs from Langdon Hall and Bijou of Stratford will compete Wednesday, June 1st in the Waterloo Iron Chef Finale! $5 at the door, advance tickets are sold out. At Nick and Nat's 21 King Street North, Waterloo. Start time is 9:30 p.m. Proceeds to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region! Good luck to all competitors!

Waterloo Iron Chef Competition Creates more than Great Food!

What could be more inspiring than food? And good healthy local food prepared by local chefs to raise funds for the local food bank?

Hats off to Nick and Nat for setting the stage to let us learn more about Foodlink Waterloo Region and the abundance of great locally grown food. And for giving local novice and experienced chefs the chance to show us what they're made of!

Last Wednesday I saw chefs from Langdon Hall and Woodstock's Six Thirty-Nine in action at Nick and Nat’s Uptown 21 in Uptown Waterloo. Only 15 minutes for menu and recipe planning, and then speedy preparation and cooking based on the local secret ingredient of the night, added up to an entertaining evening. And the secret ingredient? Goat! From local goat farmers. Now, think about it - how would you incorporate goat into dessert? Somehow the chefs pulled it off!  And all artistically presented! Four courses were prepared by each team under extreme pressure and heat in a narrow and chaotic kitchen space they had never seen before let alone cooked in!

The judging panel was highly complimentary, even though one judge claimed she did not ever eat goat! And the goat farmers who supplied the goat were impressed with the originality of the recipes, giving the chefs many thumbs up! 

Supporters sporting cowboy hats showed their pleasure and pride with loud cheers and applause over the adrenaline-pumping music, which created an atmosphere of complete pandemonium.

All in all it was a superb evening, with close to $2000 raised to date for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region.

The series has been running since April 13th. The week before last I had the pleasure of seeing students from Conestoga College (where I taught Event Marketing), compete against the Stratford Chef School. There was a lot of cheering from supporters in the standing room only crowd, and I saw a few profs from the Hospitality department at Conestoga College who had come out in support of their students. I was proud to see the students give it their all! The secret ingredient: apples form Martins Apple Farm. 

The Iron Chef events have been incredibly inspiring and entertaining. They show how a community working together can make a big difference. Also impressive were the students from Eastwood Collegiate Institute who provided technical and filming services for closed-circuit viewing of the kitchen activities. The Iron Chef events are being livestreamed on Ustream. Search Uptown Waterloo Iron Chef.
And it's not over yet!  Be there tonight, May 25th for a culinary competition between Bhimas Warung of Waterloo and Chef Shawn Hartwell of Simple Fish & Chips, Stratford.

And don't miss the finale on June 1st!

 http://www.uptown21.ca/PDA/index.html