Restaurants Canada Show 2018

Restaurants Canada Show - RC Show

Enercare Centre Toronto

Feb 25-27, 2018

www.rcshow.com

#RCShow18

Twitter@RestaurantsCA

Insta/Facebook@RestaurantsCanada

The Restaurants Canada Show has been rebranded to the RC Show since 2017 and I have been attending it for the past few years.  I was excited to attend again this year and wonder around the huge Enercare Centre with my fellow blogger friends and try and check out as many of the booths as we could.  It's a huge trade show that brings over 16,000 Food Industry professionals together under one roof.  It's pretty spectacular how many different moving parts there are to owning and running a business and this show speaks to and shows them all.  From the uniforms to the big industrial machines to the time saving food products, there is a lot to see and learn about at this show.

There are demos, panels, and all kinds of interactive and educational things at the show. And then there are the food samples.  Personally that's my favourite part.  It is a 3 day show and I wish I had time to go everyday and pace myself to be able to try it all but I have found a way to strategically do as much as I can.  Because I have gone to a lot of food related shows I am always looking for new things that I haven't tried before.  The first year I went I got hung up on the first aisle of massive quantities of cheese and was too full to try anything else.  Now I just choose cheeses I haven't seen before to try and only eat things that call my name.  Drool worthy foods that you know are going to make you happy.   

Here are 3 of the things I tried and absolutely loved.  This soft goat cheese, these amazing salami's, and the authentic pizza oven freshly made literally right out of the oven Margherita Pizza.

   

There were also panels of interesting speakers and topics.  I sat in on 2 at the speakers stage.  The morning one was from Kitchen to Print about cookbook publishing.  The moderator was from Figure 1 Publishing and on the panel was Greta Podleski from Looney Spoons, a fellow blogger Isabelle Boucher who is also a recipe developer, Joel McCharles who is ablogger turned cookbook author of the cookbook Batch and there was also a cookbook photographer named Ryan Szulic.  This was a very informative panel from independent publishing to blogging to dealing with a large publisher and what it takes to get a cookbook off the ground.

The last panel of the day had Branding and Buzzing PR's head honcho Sean Beckingham as the moderator.  The topic was Social Media and Sean is very knowledgeable in this area as he speaks about this subject a lot and knows many of the top restaurants owners in Toronto.  On the panel was Overbudget Inc's Meg McNabb, Executive Chef Sean MacDonald and Lisa Richler the editor of Canada's Best 100 restaurants.  An interesting of mixed perspectives from Chef to community manager to publication and all the different needs and practices of each one.

There were plenty of well known Chefs wondering around the show and my friend Jenny (IceCream and Knishes) loves to chat with them and had a great chat with both Chef Brad Long of Cafe Belong on the left and Former Dragon Vikram Vij of Vij's in Vancouver and he is also an entrepreneur and Chopped Canada judge.  He recently went to India with Justin Trudeau to showcase Canadian Food with his Indian heritage but it wasn't seen as a good thing by the Canadian press unfortunately.

 

In the middle of the show literally were all the industry machines and tools like this huge Hobart mixer. Can you imagine how much bread and cakes this thing can mix.  Another cool professional machine was this spinning grill.  It smelled so good with the grilled chicken on it.  Outdoor food indoors, yum.

Some of the trends in the foods we tried included loads of Pizza.  This pizza that dissapeared in about 5 seconds was a General Tao pizza. It was a meal on a pizza and was surprisingly good.  There were so many pizza ovens around the show but we chose probably the 2 best pizzas to taste.

There was spices, mixes, toppings, snacks and sprinkles and all sorts of condiments to try.

      

We really liked this natural peanut butter,  I really liked the hazelnut one and want to see it in stores soon.

     

      

     

Oh the desserts were everywhere but I was good,  I gravitated towards the gelato and tried 2 of them. I really loved the Smores Gelato that I tasted.  Once of the more interesting gelato's was the Unicorn flavour as you can see below.  I didn't try it but I bet kids would flock to that one.

       

This year it didn't seem like there were any mind blowing new things but more of things that are popular done well or with slight twists. 

My favourite thing about this show besides the delicious samples and the amazing talks is running into all the food writers, chefs and industry people that I have come to know over the past few years as a food blogger.  It's really a great place for the Industry to connect with different services and just great ways to learn and collaborate.  If you are looking to start up a restaurant business this is the best place to start at to learn what you will be getting yourself into and be prepared before you start.

I will be back as they say because it's a whole lot of fun and delicious too.