The NYC Food & Wine Festival

Saturday was such a fun day. My friend Marjorie and I went to one of the events of The NYC Food & Wine Festival. It was held at a very cool private club called Norwood, started at 2 p.m. and went late into the evening.

Because it was a nice day, they were able to hold all of the demonstrations in the backyard, which was just beautiful. The event was organized by a company called Razor, A Shiny Knife, and it was billed as an "educational, theatrical and social dinning experiment" -- which it definitely was!

Michael Cirino of Razor, a Shiny Knife was our host . . . here, he is teaching how to sharpen knives and basic knife skills. . .

The demonstration I was most excited to see was the sous-vide demonstration. This is a molecular gastronomy technique where food is basically pressurized, and it does some interesting things to its texture. Here, the example was with some yellow melon.

Before shot of the melon . . .

In the sous-vide machine. . .

Here it is, after -- look how saturated the color is and how juicy it is!

Spike from Top Chef was helping in the kitchen and came out to say hi to our group.

Andrew (also from Top Chef) is now the chef at Norwood. He came out to talk about a few things . . . the most memorable of which was the AMAZING, to die for, foie gras that he prepared. Seriously, it was amazing! Also, he was really nice, and even came to sit with us after dinner and to socialize a bit.
Michael is talking to the group about mollecular gastronomy here.

At dinner, we all received individual place settings made by a local artist. These were really cool because the design is all graffiti inspired. Very urban and beautiful!

Here, Michael is overseeing the plating of our first dish -- dungeness crab with watermelon and other yummy deliciousness. (I'll refrain from posting the entire lineup of food porn. . trust me, it was spectacular!) Fortunately, I only could eat a small bit of each dish. At the end of the meal, they told us that the full calorie count -- if you ate everything -- was over 2,000 calories. YIKES! I doubt anyone was able to finish that much though. It was a LOT of food.

And, here is me, pink and rosy from all of the good food and wine! Cheers!!