William Chong

As a duty manager of a restaurant, you get to do some cool things.  Today it was the Hospo show – basically a collection of all the players in the Hospitality Industry (sans Licensing Nazis), and had a whole host of things to see and to do!

Stalls for companies promoting their products – things like stemless martini glasses, point-of-sale systems, Tequila D’or RTD samples, chef uniforms, olive oils, Prenzel, boutique hams and pestos etc, gelato yum!

Saw the Culinary Fair competition – basically Hospo schools or big hotels etc send out teams of 2 chef/1 silver service wait staff and they compete against each other.  Judges are hardcore watching their every move: so fantastic to watch their pressure-cooker pedantics! (waiter: apron on, move fork, move knife, set towel, set glasses, set flower, apron off, prepare sth else, new apron on, gloves on, set champagne bucket, set water, set blar, set pretentious customer…)  Iron chef wannabes all hard at work on the other side of the hall, lots of people watching and cheering, would have been great to have eaten the food.

Picture of some courses prepared from a different day:

Also seeing the patisserie awards section, and the margarine sculpturing: some really creative people are out there baking and carving and preparing!!  My favourite was an Alice-in-Wonderland themed cake with accompanying Cheshire Cat, a picture frame and 2 potions.  There was also an entire Chocolate fantasy section which had desserts immaculate in presentation… if only NY did desserts to this standard!

———————

The piano man is so cute and adorable, who would ever eat him!