Picnic At The Brick Works - Another Successful, Belly-full Year!

On a somewhat dreary fall day, Toronto and beyond's culinary best showed up at The Brick Works on Bayview for another incredible year of delightful food and wine.  The event is a fundraiser for Evergreen and Slow Food Toronto (why not support sustainable, local food, plus bringing more green to our cities?!); this year was its third annual.

The place was abuzz with foodies, locavores, farmers, chefs, shutterbugs and the odd super-weird person (yes, you, girl dressed like mother earth gone wrong).

Our first stop was a delightful amuse from C5 - open fire cooked lamb with harissa duck egg mayonnaise on cornbread.  Moving on, the chicken liver pate with fried chicken skin and manischewitz reduction on chala from Chezvous was incredible.  I am definitely finding a way to work friend chicken skin into just about everything I do.  The elk stew at Langdon Hall was succulent and bursting with flavour.  Right next door to it were pillowy gnocchi with comfort cream sauce from Zucca.  Gnocchi does know the way to my heart ...

Though I wasn't in the mood for sweets, I couldn't resist Epic's home made honey ice cream with rye marinated blueberries in a brandy snap basket.  Not to mention the chef let me come behind the table to take some pics of the honey comb, complete with happy, honey-making bees.

There were a few misses for me, including the Korean ribs that sadly didn't get enough cooking time to break down the meat enough (read: I couldn't even tear off a bite).  I was proud of myself for having tried the tongue, but found it to be a mushy, somewhat bland and grey version of corned beef.

At a price of $110 per ticket ($90 in advance), Picnic at The Brick Works is not a cheap way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but it's helluva good food and drink.  I promise you won't regret it ... so be sure to sign up to email updates from Evergreen so you can be reminded to go next year.