food

After two days of enjoying some of the best recipes in Second Helpings, Please!, a staple in any Jewish home, with my family, I tasted new concoctions by Chef Jason Bartenger at the Oliver and Bonacini Canteen in the TIFF Bell Lightbox. There, I reunited with ladies whom I’ve affectionately categorized online as the “Indigo Tweets Crew”. For this reunion dinner however, there were not even any Indigo employees present! They were greatly missed though, especially by those of us who hadn’t seen Captain Awesome (aka Cammy, the author of @indigogreenroom tweets, who arranges for fans to meet celebrities across Canada) at the Word on the Street Festival last weekend.

Jennifer, a librarian technician at Humber College who made tonight’s reservations, showed off her new “practical, yet sexy” pumps from Naturalizer, which received the group’s stamp of approval for being stylish too. If only I had been on the other side of the table to capture it on camera when she pulled one off to show us… That was a funny moment, right there in the restaurant on a Friday night. Oh well. It just goes to show you how after meeting each other only once or twice at Indigo events, we already share a great camaraderie.

The reunion dinner couldn’t have been scheduled much later in the fall because after exploring all that Toronto has to offer, including a gig working at CTV, Elizabeth is returning home to Newfoundland this week! Hopefully she’ll be able to squeeze in a trip to the theatre to see Kim Cattrall on stage, which is on my to-do list as well, time permitting. It has already been agreed that a tweet up will be built around her next visit to Toronto. Plus, I just documented it, so now it’ll for sure have to happen!

Oh yes, and then there’s the food, i.e. the scrumptious platters that Chef Bartenger delivered to us himself, accompanied by detailed explanations of the ingredients and preparation. There’s a reason we returned to eat at the Lightbox and it wasn’t just because of the chef’s good looks.

Tonight marked the first time I’ve ever had a beet salad and liked it and I wasn’t alone in loving each piece topped with Greek yogurt and granola.

Servings of flatbread, chicken pate, steak tartare and frites with grated cheese were also slid down the table in between us and enjoyed by all. At this point, the menus doubling as placemats beneath our plates had been nearly forgotten about, but we continued to indulge by ordering beef brisket sandwiches, scallops and desserts, including a root beer float. The float was also served to an eleven year old birthday girl upstairs who apparently has impeccable manners and an excellent vocabulary, or at least that’s the word on the street.

There was some conversation about book signings, recent purchases and the new augmented reality interactive experiences offered by Indigo, but there was surprisingly little talk about social media at all this time. We were simply 8 friends gathered in downtown Toronto, unwinding at the end of the week and enjoying each other’s company before returning to our regular routines as students, young professionals, teachers and mothers.

At the the end of the evening, as we reached for our coats and decided to institute our tweet up as a quarterly event, Jennifer generously offered tickets to a blogger event. Things like that just don’t happen in London, Ontario, nor does the event Word on the Street I’m afraid.

Marketing professionals are continually seeking ways to make their initiatives appear organic. There’s something quite authentic about women feeling inspired by a corporate-sponsored event to coordinate their own that’s equally as intimate as the first by using the tool that brought us all together in the first place: Twitter.