eat! vancouver: samples anyone?
I recently attended the Eat! Vancouver Food and Cooking Festival with my whole family. If you like free samples, this is the place to be. On our way in, we were given a goodie bag of samples including creamy dill potato chips, a yogurt granola bar, a green teabag, Splenda, and flax seeds. I always love starting out the day with some free food!
Eat! Vancouver was divided up into different areas which included a wellness section, a wine and beer section, a chocolate section, an international section, and even a pet food area. There were also several stages for various chefs doing their thing, and the big name chefs were Rob Feenie and Anna Olson from the Food Network. You could easily spend the whole day sampling, tasting, shopping, eating, and drinking (my fave ways to spend a day).
As it was our first time attending the festival, we erringly purchased a bunch of food tickets. The tickets were good for appy-sized samples of the Bite of Vancouver restaurants’ menu items. Most of the samples were in the $1 to $4 range. We ate sate, cupcakes, chocolate covered fruit kabobs, Malaysian noodles, and coconut rice. Sure, it was good, but the free stuff we got was even better!
The free samples we had included salmon, ice cream cones, pumpkin seeds, trail mix, flax cereal, triple chocolate desserts, popcorn, cassava chips, pomegranate juice, rice crackers, and yogurt. Other free samples included espresso, rice pudding, soda pop, flavoured water, kettle chips, sesame snaps, and cheese. I could go on. We got so full on samples that we had leftover food tickets and ended up buying baked goods to go, just to use up our tickets.
It was hog heaven.
The cost for entry tickets was $14 dollars for adults, $6 for kids 7 to 14, and free for kids 6 and under. We went on a Sunday and the crowds weren’t too bad until about 2 p.m. So if you get a chance to go next year, try to get there early to avoid long lineups - especially if you take the kids.
I’ll definitely be back next year.