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Duck confit poutine from Bar One in Milford. Photo by Matt Ingersoll.
New Hampshire PoutineFest Poutine has become such a staple in the Granite State that an annual festival launched two years ago in Manchester, in which local restaurants compete on making the best poutine dish as determined by a panel of judges and attendees’ votes, has attracted hundreds of people from New England and beyond. The New Hampshire PoutineFest, held in June every year at Northeast Delta Dental Stadium in Manchester, was introduced in 2016 by the Franco-American Centre. Since then, event coordinator Tim Beaulieu said the event has exploded in popularity. Tickets to this year’s festival sold out entirely within the first week of being on sale, including all of its VIP tickets within the first 24 hours. “We actually had found some Google Trends data that showed that the Manchester and Boston areas were No. 2 in the United States for Google searches of poutine,” Beaulieu said of the idea to start a poutine festival. “Now we’ve become kind of the goto in New England for it. … There have been are other smaller festivals, but ours is by far the biggest.” Around a dozen or so restaurants, food trucks and other vendors usually participate in PoutineFest, most of which are from New Hampshire while others hail from neigh-
boring states like Massachusetts and Maine, according to Beaulieu. Festival attendees each receive a “passport” upon entry on which they get stamps from each vendor they taste. “We give them a little chip that they vote on by putting it in the bucket of the vendor that is their favorite,” he said. A panel of judges also determines the winner, who receives the title of Best Poutine and a WWE-like Championship Belt. One of the judges is wild game chef Denny Corriveau of WildCheff Enterprises, a Manchester native of Québécois descent. Since the festival’s inception, a “Restaurant Hall of Fame” has been added to the event’s website, listing each participating vendor in years past and each respective winner. The Lowell, Mass.-based Vulgar Display of Poutine food truck took home the title of the inaugural festival, followed by Bar One in Milford in 2017 and the Kettlehead Brewing Co. in Tilton this year. The fourth annual New Hampshire PoutineFest is tentatively scheduled for June 2019, but Beaulieu said he tries to keep the event’s Facebook page active year-round, sharing poutine-related posts and stories during the event’s off months. “People just go crazy for it,” he said.
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728 River Road • New Boston, NH 603.497.5788 grasshoppersgardencenter.com
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poutine on a menu, it will remind them of Québéc because maybe they have Mémés and Pépés still living up there, and it reminds them of when they used to make it.” And the more restaurants introducing dishes like poutine on their menus, the more likely others are to try their own versions, Corriveau said. “From the standard restaurant perspective of things, they like to latch on to things they think are great ideas and would appeal to what people want,” he said, “and if they see a lot of attention being paid to this particular ethnic dish, then they may throw it out there themselves to see if people gravitate to it.”
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French newspaper founded in 15 the city, but sometimes a neighborhood of the Queen City would become known as a “Petit Canada,” or a “Little Canada,” named for its French-speaking population. Although poutine didn’t come along in Canada until the 1950s, Lagueux said New Hampshire’s — and especially Manchester’s — Franco-American heritage is a contributing factor to its American popularity. “The people coming here from [Québéc], would have children here, and you know, maybe they’d go back to Canada to see their family and things like that … and they still eat poutine,” he said. “Now if they saw
HIPPO | OCTOBER 4 - 10, 2018 | PAGE 17