Food, friends and fun

When I'm not stalking celebrity chefs, I love a good food and wine festival. There's nothing like paying a somewhat exorbitant amount of money to then turn around and gorge yourself with food and vino. It's like a dare. Oh, you don't think I can eat $60 worth of food and wine in three hours? Watch me.

And I did on Saturday, but with all of this talk of Emeril haven't had time to post my update.

My lady friends and I headed out for the eighth annual Suncoast Food and Wine Fest at the Lakewood Ranch polo grounds. Despite the high price tag, I enjoy this event every year. It can get a little overwhelming - there are over 1,000 people and 300 kinds of winds - but the key is to just go enjoy being outside and being in good company.

I will admit, for the most part, that the food this year seemed fairly lackluster. Understandably, these restaurants are cooking for a mass crowd and have to be ready to man a three hour rush. I remember more luxurious dishes in past years, and wonder if some places scaled back because of the recession.

A friend of wine suggested I post some of my impressions on the blog, so without further ado ...

Best of show

Every year I've been to the fest, hands down, Tommy Bahama has the best food. It makes me wonder why I've never gone to eat there. They always have ribs that just fall off the bone and year after year are consistently memorable. The restaurant menu says that its a blackberry brandy sauce. They also served some sort of pineapple cake and probably the best thing at the festival, a creamy crab bisque that is just so smooth with a touch of sweetness that comes from sherry.

Perhaps the dark horse of the event was the lobster ravioli from Let's Eat!, one of those places where you go to make masses of dinner and bring it home to freeze it. My friends liked the steak sandwiches from Ruth's Chris. I, of course, enjoyed the little shredded pork sandwiches that Derek's was serving.

Can't believe I ate that

Just try to guess where the worst thing we all ate at the festival came from.

I'll start by saying it was a fairly small scallop served over a bed of carrot slaw and absolutely doused in some sort of dark soy sauce. As soon as the scallop hit your tongue you were hit by this overwhelming taste of salt, like eating a salt lick. If your taste buds survived the shock you could detect an extremely fishy taste that followed, which made me think the scallops were poor quality and I wondered if they over seasoned them on purpose to try and cover up the inferior seafood. The carrot slaw was no better. So where did this not-so-tasty delicacy come from? That's right. The elite Ritz Carlton Members Club. If they serve that in their restaurant, I guess you don't always get what you pay for.

There was another restaurant, whose name I can't remember, that served an etouffee with shrimp so soft that when I picked up the shell of mine the meat, literally, crumbled off. Yuck!

The thing I hate about big events like this is that there are so many wines, and not many of them are too memorable, that it's hard to find anything too exiting. It's definitely better as a social event to go relax with friends and enjoy the weather.

We were having so much fun, I started revving everyone up for the other big Sarasota food and wine fest, Forks and Corks, that they've done for the past two years in the spring at the Ringling. The big downside: spring in Florida is pretty frickin hot. Not the kind of weather you want to eat copious amounts of food in.

But out of curiosity I checked the event's web site Sunday to see if they set a date yet. It brought a smile to my face. They moved it up to January. The weather will be perfect : )