Iron Fork Nashville

Last week, I attended my third (of four) Iron Fork Nashville events! It's such a wonderful event--your ticket gets you a ton of food samples from the area's finest restaurants and caterers plus three drinks from the bar. However, the bartender was generous with the ThreeFour Roses bourbon, so I actually only used just one of my drink tickets!

There were a lot of new faces this year; not just among the restaurants, but among the contestants as well. A new addition this year, Perl Catering actually served one of my favorite dishes--a caramelized onion bisque. And there were lots of other great vegetarian options: Finezza, Urban Flats, Wild Iris, Mambu, Provence, and Rumba as well as desserts from Hot & Cold (Mexican caramel paleta dipped in chocolate!) and Cupcake Collection (the city's best cupcakes). I left quite satisfied.

This year's mystery ingredient was green almonds, which a lot of us had mis-heard as green olives. Certainly, the competition was harder with the former rather than the latter. Chris Chamberlain--one of the judges--gives a great description of all the competitors' dishes on the Nashville Scene's BITES blog. I was too busy sampling and socializing to pay much attention to the competition! But I did get a few pictures:



The contestants right in the middle of the action



The wonderful ladies at Finezza serving vegetarian pasta salad and tiramisu--yum!

Me and my new best friend, Tiffany Derry from Top Chef/Top Chef Masters and blogger Beth of Eat.Drink.Smile and her friend, Leslie

The event is a lot of fun and proceeds benefit the Martha O'Bryan Center. Well worth the $40 per ticket. If you're sorry you missed this, then you should definitely think about going to one or both of two more great food events coming up: Generous Helpings on Thursday, May 19, 2011 at the Farmers Market (again--tickets are just $40 per person and will include more food than you can ever hope to eat from the city's best restaurants--buy tickets here) which benefits the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee and then  Taste of Music City on Saturday June 4, 2011 (buy tasting tickets for each booth for as little as $1 each in advance) which benefits (hey, whaddyaknow) the Martha O'Bryan Center.

Whew, that's a lot of great food. I'm glad to know that all of these events are vegetarian-friendly, too.