Wok+Wine
Posted on | August 24, 2011 | No Comments
I had the extreme pleasure of bringing my Mom to a Foodspotting and Wok+Wine event held at the offices of Luminary Labs in Tribeca. I didn’t know anything about W+W, but I’m an avid Foodspotting user, so I wasn’t going to pass this opportunity up. After doing a bit of research online, I found out that W+W is the brainchild of Peter Mandeno & is basically a way for people to get together & network. A quote from the website sums it up: ‘40 people, 40 pounds of jumbo shrimp and 40 bottles of delicious wine!‘
I wasn’t sure What I was getting myself into, but I knew I’d be drinking a lot of wine & eating shrimp with my fingers so I dressed casually in dark clothes. We started with and awesome Russian River Valley 2005 Zinfandel from Oriel Wines, I’m not much of a red wine fan, but this was really damn good! About 30 minutes into the event the wok was fired & the first batch of shrimp went in. The table had been prepped with Newspaper, banana leaves & plenty of bread. Peter gave us a speech about W+W, then showed us how to properly eat the jumbo head-on shrimp using his motto: ‘Rip, Lick, Bite, Suck‘.
The shrimp were simply done with a few spices (salt, red pepper flakes, pepper) & parsley over high heat, but they were delicious. Within moments everyone was laughing together, covered in chili oil & talking. It didn’t take long for a 2nd batch to come out.
Finally after 3 woks of shrimp (40lbs) we were offered drinks to cool ourselves down & lemon to wash our hands which were stained red by now. I met some awesome people there; Amy from Foodspotting, Kathy From The Experimental Gourmand & Howard, another Foodspotting user. The food & wine were great, but the connections I made was the best part of this event.
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