Gin with maple syrup … amazing. RÉDUIT Piger Henricus (at left) and regular Piger Henricus, from Quebec.
This week I was in New York City for the International Restaurant & Foodservice Show. It’s an opportunity for restaurant owners to check out new kitchen equipment, barware, dining room furnishings and such with demos from well-informed manufacturers’ reps. If you’re in the market for a food truck, gyro grill or robo sushi maker, this is your show. It’s also the first conference where I got to pee on the product: the mens’ rooms were sponsored by WizKid, a purveyor of urinal mats and disinfectants.
Need a new food truck?
But, as always, we were here for the food. Exhibitors included a lot of brown-and-serve bakery products and premade goodies ready to pop into a fryer, as you’d expect. But there were also some mom-and-pop operations which, one suspects, want to get exposure to food influencers without the expense of the much bigger Fancy Food Show.
Or maybe a gyro grill?
My favorite discovery was Asarasi, the world’s first organic water. Say what? It turns out that most maple syrup producers have switched to a reverse osmosis system that filters out the sugar-bearing sap at an early stage in the distilling process, leaving a lot of water as a byproduct. Asarasi bottles and sells this water, reducing waste and giving maple producers another income stream. It can legitimately be called organic because it comes from a plant cultivated to organic strictures. And it tastes pretty good, i.e. clean and refreshing with just an (imagined?) hint of sugar. (There are also flavored versions, which didn’t tempt me.) The distributor list includes mostly unfamiliar names but also Unfi and Sysco, so it’s quite possible you can get some if you ask about it.
Asarasi booth offered the world’s first organic water, from maple trees.
On the maple theme, there was a lot of alcohol at this show and a lot of it was maple-flavored: bourbons and ryes which spend part of their aging time in barrels that have held maple syrup. I participated in a controlled tasting which I’ll write about separately. I also ran into “Les Subversifs”, a Quebec microdistillery which makes gin with parsnips (!) plus a huge juniper berry component and mixes some of this gin with maple syrup to create a liqueur which according to the proprietress is something her family traditionally drank when they were sugaring. (No reverse osmosis for them, though they’re considering it.) Really delicious stuff. U.S. distribution is spotty at this point but it’s universally available at government liquor stores in Montreal. The gin is Piger Henricus; the maple liqueur is RÉDUIT Piger Henricus.
P.S. Before signing off, I’m going to put on my marketing hat (my day job) and get cranky about something. I usually try to hit trade shows the first day, but because of scheduling issues I attended this one on the last day. The show officially ended at 4 pm Tuesday but well before that fully 2/3 of the exhibitors had packed their booths and departed. There’s no excuse for this because it’s a local show (no planes to catch) and it’s too late to miss rush hour. If you’re not going to stay till the end, just in case that dream prospect shows up at 3:59, you might as well stay home.
