Vancouver will get a taste of a new food and beer festival focusing on local, organic meats and B.C. breweries with Brewery and the Beast.
The festival of meat began in Victoria last September, outside of the Phillips Brewing Company. This year, the festival is expanding into Vancouver, and will be featuring many of our citys restaurants, butcher shops and specialty stores. Its at Concord Pacific Lot (88 Pacific Boulevard,) on June 16, 1 to 4 p.m.
One of those restaurants is Gastowns Wildebeest. The restaurant opened last fall and focuses on nose-to-tail cuisine the menu contains items ranging from pork jowl to Angus short ribs.
We were lucky enough to be one of the first to the table, and we thought we would be a good fit, said James Iranzad, co-owner of Wildebeest. Well be working with charcoal, which is not exactly something we can cook with inside, plus its an opportunity to get outside, have some good food and beer, and see what the other chefs in Vancouver are doing.
Wildebeest will be working on a variation of its beef short rib, which will feature shallots and a bone marrow crumb.
Sustainable eating is nothing new to Vancouver. The city has been pushing for urban agriculture and food security for several years, and local businesses such as Tap & Barrel and Vijs Rangoli (which will also have a presence at the festival) have embraced it.
People will go for local, high-end meats whenever and wherever possible. We would all eat it if we could, said Scott Gurney, coordinator for Brewery and the Beast. British Columbia is in a great situation where we have so much land for grazing and so much sea for harvesting. Theres a trend towards these meats and more and more people are going with it. Sure its more expensive, but the health benefits pay off in the long run.
A large inspiration for Brewery and the Beast is the classic American barbecue. Gurney said that he used several events in the U.S. as a jumping off point and added a Canadian West Coast spin on it, which includes embracing cooking styles from different ethnic neighbourhoods in Vancouver.
I wanted the ambience of the event to be like a summer backyard barbecue, what you and your friends would do on a Sunday afternoon, Gurney said. Eat some food, have a couple beers, socialize. We want to create a comfortable environment where guests can ask chefs anything and chefs can try out food from different restaurants. It started out as a backyard barbecue on a larger scale and morphed into a high-end food festival.
The casual environment means that guests can expect to see chefs going off the menu. Pork cheek waffles, duck skin toffee and wild boar sliders were all popular dishes at last years Brewery and the Beast. Gurney hopes the festival will create a lasting impression and inspire attendees to try local meat all year round.
Sustainable food is important because it creates a reusable food source, Gurney said. We want a lot of food to be available and we want it to be the good stuff. We want people to go to the grocers and recognize meat from an Abbotsford farm, it keeps our industry turning and minimizes our carbon footprint We dont just want people to walk away with full stomachs, but with a new outlook.
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