Food Fête Favorites

One person's haul from Food Fête. Photo: craigemorsels/Flickr

If New York City's annual Fancy Food Show is a hurricane of food-related items, occupying three vast floors of the sprawling Javits Center, then the tiny, cramped Food Fête is its spin-off tornado.

Hosted in a smaller space and likewise designed to get food writers and editors interested in new and interesting culinary products, the Fête was an interesting and slightly chaotic affair. High-end eats were hawked right up alongside lower-end food, from a very tasty slice of grass-fed steak to a Kikkoman "umami" demonstration in which we were subjected to a taste-off between a regular chocolate and one containing soy sauce -- a rather palate-numbing experience, that.

Former Top Cheffer Stephanie Izard was there with Lucini, the spicy olive oil she endorses, which she had drizzled on a very tasty panzanella. She told us she hadn't had a chance to roam the halls yet. But we had, and our faves are after the jump.

Señor Sangria: An inexpensive sangria in a wine bottle (no hard alcohol involved). It's bottled in New York State by a New Jersey resident, but its base is a sweet, mild Chilean Merlot and a few fruit juices like lime. Garnish with a hunk of orange.

Crave Brothers' Petit Frère farmstead cheese. The four brothers who run this farm live in Wisconsin, and brother George's wife Debbie took the long trip east. She's enjoyed her stay in the city so far, taking in a "hilarious" show on Broadway before returning to her home on a dead-end road. The brothers should be proud of this decadently silky, Brie-like cheese.

Roth Käse's excellent smoked Gorgonzola seemed like a natural match for beef (blue cheese-stuffed burgers, anyone?) so we sidled on over to the Artisan Beef Institute to wrap a hunk of the stuff in a slice of grass-fed dry-aged Angus from California's Gleason Ranch. We were not disappointed.

Organic Nectars' 50 percent cacao raw cacao bar. The texture of this raw, refined sugar-free chocolate blew our minds, since we'd just attended a class on chocolate making in which the chocolatier asserted that agave was no good for chocolate bars. The secret ingredient in Organic Nectars' version? Palm nectar. It's incredibly tasty for a refined sugar-free bar, so to those watching their glycemic indexes, look for it in late July.

California black mission figs, halved, seared and topped with a French triple blue cheese. These are in season all summer, you lucky Californians, you.

Prosciutto pesto by Pesto with Panache. One of the women hawking this product advised us, apropos of nothing, that it was a "man trap." Pesto with Panache also sells an oddball blueberry pesto and a fig-Gorgonzola concoction, but the prosciutto pesto was our senior editor's favorite.

Aequare Fine Chocolates' lemongrass chocolate bar. In general, these events are saturated by chocolatiers, but this one made an impression. Perhaps more odd and memorable than strictly delicious, the bar is now available only online, but it's under $4 retail, and is a single-origin, single-estate bar actually made in Ecuador (thereby supporting local workers, who according to the company's founder thus get more of the profits).

Though Food Fête is a one-day-only extravaganza, there's one day left of the Fancy Food Show, and we'll be Twittering all about it.