Join us for a street food party!
SHEWCHUK ON SIMMER
at The Cookbook Co. Cooks and Metrovino Saturday, July 18th, noon-3 pm
YYC food trucks are setting up shop in the parking lot behind Metrovino and Calgary is invited! The roster includes Jane Bond, Bento Burrito, Red Wagon Diner, Sticky Ricky’s, Take it and Go, The Noodle Bus, as well as a selection of delicious, local ice creams, and live music by The Dick Clark 3! There is no cover charge for this event – just show up and purchase what you would like directly from the trucks. Grown-ups can join us inside at Beer & Rosé Garden for a glass of wine or a local craft beer by Village Brewery to pair with your street eats.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been to a few theme parties that were a blast. Perhaps my favourite was an Italian “mobster” dinner where the hosts picked up all of the guests in a vintage limousine complete with “henchmen” wearing big fedoras and pinstriped suits, who were “packing heat” in the form of squirt guns filled with martinis. Whenever someone opened his mouth, he’d get drowned in a hail of gin and vermouth gunfire. Now, that was a clever theme party, although I admit that I’m not all that crisp on how the evening ended. All I know is that I awoke fully dressed in my gangster suit, which had somehow gotten totally encrusted with parmesan cheese. In keeping with the rules of the mafia, I didn’t ask questions afterward.
Location: The parking lot behind Metrovino, 722 - 11th Ave. SW Drink tickets for the Beer & Rosé Garden available on-site, the day of the event.
We are all things culinary... THE COOKBOOK CO. COOKS
My theme party hatred is rooted in the fact that my wife works for a company that makes every function it has a theme party. I’m not kidding. Retirement lunches, office moves and even Friday drinks must have a costume dress-up angle and a topical subject. One such dinner had a James Bond 007 motif and so, given my body type, I went as Goldfinger’s bowler-wearing, keg-shaped bad guy, Oddjob. I spent the whole night sweating under a cheap hobby shop hat with most of my dinner hanging off the prickly glue-on moustache under my nose. It was three hours of hell.
722-11th Avenue SW Phone 403-265-6066, ext.1 VI EW O U R S PR I NG CO O K I NG CL A S S S C HED ULE AT
cookbookcooks.com
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2015
Worse yet is that even the company’s Christmas parties have themes. A few years ago, it was Pirates of the Caribbean. This is CHRISTMAS! What’s wrong with just having Santa and reindeer and jingle bells and maybe Christmas as the theme? Instead, I had to line up at the bar with people who had fake parrots on their shoulders, yelling “Haaarrr, Matey!” all night. It was enough to make me want to walk the plank. Another dinner party killer is the dreaded murder mystery. Sure, this genre of entertainment can be fun if all of the guests are totally into it. But my experience is that people lose interest in the plot pretty quickly, and if some poor, starving actor gets hired to play a role all night, he or she usually gets ignored while the volume of the table conversation keeps going up and eventually drowns out the clues being dropped. Pretty soon the pitiful characters in the mystery are about as welcome as a mime outside your window at a fancy restaurant. I’m always surprised that these fake murder mysteries don’t turn into real murders of the host and hostess by the actors who are sweating it out for a rude audience, or by the guests who have to endure this kind of torture. It dawned on me while writing this that perhaps the worst theme parties are those we’ve all attended often – weddings. Think about it. There are costumes – a bride looking like a meringue, and her seven bridesmaids in hideous robin’s-egg-blue dresses. Even though a lot of fussing may have gone into the meal, the dinner is inevitably sabotaged by interminable speeches that begin with, “Now the reply to the toast to the groomsmen!” I suppose it could be worse – people could actually start to have “theme weddings” more often. With my luck, one day I’ll get invited to a Pirates of the Caribbean wedding. I can just see it. “Haarrr, Matey! Do ye take this wench to be yer lawfully wedded wife?” Just shoot me – preferably with a squirt gun full of gin so I can forget it all.
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CITY PALATE.ca MAY JUNE 2015
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HOW ABOUT JUST DINNER?
I winced as I read the instructions about how to dress, how to get into “character” and the various irritating games we would have to play over the course of what would now, no doubt, be an excruciating night. I immediately started to think of excuses to bow out. Maybe, if we were lucky, we would have to go to a funeral, where I was certain we would have more fun.
Foodies that flock together, rock together!
3 locations in Calgary
Allan Shewchuk
I have bemoaned in the past how my wife and I don’t get invited out very much. Many of our friends admit to being timid cooks who feel uneasy about hosting a culinary instructor. So imagine my joy when a dinner party invitation arrived in the mail from a super-fun couple with whom we love to hang out. I was so hyped thinking about actually going to someone else’s home and not having to shop, cook or clean up. Someone was having us over! Yay! But then I started to read the fine print on the invitation and went from ecstasy to agony in 0.5 seconds – it was a theme party.
The Food Truck Flock is back...
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Allan Shewchuk is a food writer and sought-after Italian food and wine guru. He currently has kitchens in both Calgary and Florence, Italy, but will drink wine pretty much anywhere.