On December 4 the Second All-Ukrainian Cookery Festival ended in Kyiv’s Palace of Sports. This action, which involved over two hundred catering organizations, is the only place where caterers can rub shoulders, learning about the services of the best restaurants and bars, new trends in the culinary business, and extending their business cooperation.
While part of the exposition including restaurant and hotel equipment, furniture, accessories, plates, and dishes was of interest primarily for the professionals and did not draw much public attention, everybody was attracted by the work of the cooks at the Cookery Championship, which was held for the first time within the framework of the festival. In the Pastry nomination the contestants were to cook two copies of a five-kilogram cake (in the photo), so that the jury could simultaneously taste it and estimate the appearance of the entire composition. Representatives of fashionable restaurants, as well as small firms, demonstrated their culinary skills in two nominations: making a delicacy dish for a banquet and Black Box contest, where the contenders were suggested first to win a certain set of products and then to prepare something original out of them under the jury’s strict control.
The participants of the Bartender Championship had to pass a test on their professional erudition and then demonstrate their faultless eye by pouring cocktail ingredients into separate vessels in the necessary proportion with no measuring glass. Incidentally, it appeared that the sight usually bewitching to spectators, the art of juggling with bottles in the process of mixing drinks, is not appropriate for any cocktail. The ritual of concocting some of the classical blends requires an accented reserve, which was also evaluated by specialists in a corresponding contest.
On the whole, most customers, whose appetite was whetted by the exhibited delicacies, were confused only with the fact that many restaurants offered taste tests of their specialties at quite a pricey tab. This is not quite understandable: to attract potential customers to their places, the owners should fix accessible prices at such actions. This time, for many gourmets with not such stuffed wallets the exhibition proved to be purely museum art.
