I had such a full weekend full of glorious food sampling. On Saturday, I attended SPQR’s Executive Chef – Matthew Accarrino’s SF Chef cooking demo at Williams Sonoma in San Francisco’s Union Square. After his informative demo, I had the wonderful opportunity to interview him through the help of Foodbuzz.
After the interview, I noticed that the next demo was the famed Chef Gary Danko of Gary Danko restaurant. I added my name to the waiting list and returned later.
Meanwhile, I hopped over to Yerba Buena Gardens to check out Pistahan, the annual Filipino festival. Grubbin’ Filipino food, various stage performers from the Filipino community, and booths with Filipino themed T-shirts, crafts, and community info are what you will find at Pistahan.
The lines were too long at all of the food booths so I decided to set down on the grass and enjoy the stage performances – a rapper and a hip hop dance group worthy of America’s Best Dance Crew.
Then I headed back to Williams Sonoma, hoping that I could get into the Gary Danko cooking demo. I didn’t know that you have to sign up before hand to get a coveted seat (1 of 40), where you are guaranteed food samples from the cooking demo.
When I arrived there were 20 people waiting behind the velvet rope, hoping to get in. I waited with them, assuming they were on the waiting list. After a few minutes, I asked around and no one was on the waiting list. Then I found out that they weren’t keeping track of people on the waiting list. Lame!
There were 20 empty seats about 10 minutes before the demo and I was wondering how I would get in. It seemed impossible at this point. So I talked to one of the Williams Sonoma workers in the back and she recognized me from the previous demo with Matthew Accorrino. She saw that I had interviewed him and that I was a food blogger so she let me in!
One good thing led to another. The co-producer of the show did an intro for Gary Danko and mentioned that we could get into the Sugar Party at the Westin St. Francis hotel, if we mentioned his name. Wow! What an awesome opportunity.
After the Gary Danko demo, I walked by the Westin St. Francis, only 1 block away and decided to try using his name. And guess what? It worked. What a glorious Saturday I had with free cooking demos and tastings!
On Sunday, I went to Pistahan with my husband and we bumped into Ron Quesada of Rama Foods International. And I got to meet his brother, PJ, who is marketing director at Rama Foods. They were talking about going to a Filipino food cookoff, Culinarya, which was the first time I heard about this.
PJ was able to get me and my husband into this private event. Thanks, PJ! There were only about less than 50 people there. Amateur cooks and professional cooks made classic Filipino dishes that were judged, while the audience was also able to sample the dishes. Fun!
Stay tuned for my posts on each of these events.
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Oh my gosh, I am so envious of all those great foodie opportunities that opened up for you! That Filipino cook off sounds like something I would have loved attending. Nice to be in the right place at the right time.
By the way, House of Annie has moved to its own domain, http://www.houseofannie.com. I’d appreciate it if you changed the link in your blogroll to point to the new site instead of http://chezannies.blogspot.com. Thanks!
Hi Nate,
thanks for the comment. I changed the link.