TORONTO FOOD AND DRINK FEST

There is an awesome food and drink festival happening right now in Toronto at the Metro Convention Centre! If you are a fan of new foods, innovative drinks and a fun environment you need to check this festival out! It is a 19+ event because there is open alcohol and drink sampling!

We got our tickets online a few days before and they were around $20 CAD, the navigation was well labeled and we found the entrance very easily, they checked our IDs and then scanned out tickets and guided us towards to escalator, we went up and was immediately greeted by the welcome sign and employees handing us maps to the event and a list of all the vendors!

The first booth that you see is the Barbados booth, this has fun vibes, great music, people in costumes and most importantly, really good food and drinks! They gave us a drink with Bajan rum, banana liqueur, and honey syrup, and it was paired with a banana chip dipped in chocolate. They explained to us that the way they curated the combination to taste is by combining the taste of the chip and drink, having it all at the same time! And it was absolutely delicious and really had some amazing flavor!

Next, they had some mixology classes but unfortunately they were booked solid until much later in the evening! We started walking around and trying many samples from different vendors, and there were so many! We started in aisle 100 and worked our way down! We started with a hot sauce flight, tasting different hot sauces at different levels, then we tasted some gourmet popcorn. There were many different ones to try, but I went with the sweet heat and that was awesome! It was savoury with a bit of a kick!

There were so many drinks to try! We tried ginger beer, vodka, bubble tea and so much more! Many vendors were giving out small samples and some were only selling products! We got some peppered jam and a few other cooking treats like authentic Thai red curry! Next we got some fun cocktails like boozy bubble tea! I absolutely love bubble tea so this was a nice twist, I got the mango tequila green tea with coconut jelly. While it was great, I felt like it lacked a little flavour and could’ve been much better!

We kept walking around and tasting many different things, like natural lemonade, smoothie bowls, alcohol infused honey, and one of my favourite samples for the day was the Bajan Fish Cake, it was battered with spices and fried then served with a hot sauce or cream sauce! It was crispy, full of flavour and super delicious!

We had a few cocktails from Top Shelf Spirit and it was some of my favourite drinks of the day, we tried the Island Mule which was a tropical twist on a traditional Moscow mule, it was beautifully presented with a dehydrated pineapple! I also had the speakeasy cocktail which was a citrus drink that included absinthe and was actually really refreshing! Each of these cocktails are around $5. They also had some non-alcoholic chocolate chai creamy sangria sampling and it was surprisingly so tasty!

We were feeling a little hungry and wanted to get something to eat, there was so much to choose from! We decided to get some chicken dumplings and they were so delicious! We topped the dumplings with peanut sauce as well as chilli oil and it was awesome! It was such a nice light bite as we were walking around and eating and drinking so much!

Next, we visited the Flor de Cana booth and had another cocktail sampling, we tried the Momotombo and Pool-Side Punch, these were both so tasty and had an island flavour with a spirit forward taste! We also had some non-alcoholic mimosa’s that included a non-alcoholic champagne, and a few other samples!

One of my favourite foods for the day was the Tokyo fries, this was definitely a hidden gem and was so worth it! It was seasoned perfectly and topped with so many sauces and garnishes, and was packaged up in a cute mini Chinese take-out container! We also had some mutton rolls from Reggie’s Rolls but they weren’t my personal fav!

Lastly, we were on the hunt for some sweet treats. We got a white peach bellini popsicle and it was so full of flavour! This was awesome, and we also got some really creamy ice cream. I got the lemon poppyseed pistachio and it was delicious!