If I'm not mistaken, I've used this space before to bang on about the food
at the RAI Conference Centre - a most tasty topic, I might add. This year, I
have to admit, they have shown to be more than capable of serving up most
delectable titbits. Of course finger food is not in the same league as a hot
meal (don't you wish some restaurants would confine themselves to serving
amuses?), but I've taken their acumen of opting to stick to this restriction
as proof of RAI's growing awareness of what makes their guests happy as well
as what they themselves are best at. I never even got round to sampling
everything on offer: with a degree of single-mindedness bordering on the
obsessive, I kept returning for yet another star-shaped piece of brown bread
topped with a dollop of liver mousse, a piece of marinated cooked meat
(probably veal) and something sweet and sour yet slightly tart which defied
my clumsy analytical powers.
A little later I selected a canapé from a passing tray to which I deftly
added a smidgin of mustard - quite unnecessarily, it turned out, for the
flavour of the soft cream-coloured stuffing pleasingly ran the gamut from
mild-yet-savoury to spicy-with-just-a-bit-of-an-edge. Such composition of
flavours! There was just one snag, which may have been due to the stuffing
being slightly too runny or the not terribly crispy shell being slightly too
chewy, but which in any event caused many an unsuspecting food-lover having
all this loveliness end up in entirely the wrong place.
The upshot was that no matter how zealous their dabbing and patting, thirty
percent of the visitors were doomed to spend the rest of the evening
participating in the trade fair decked out like Rohrschach test cards.
Funnily enough that sort of thing tends to put the kybosh on buyer response.
It is therefore my opinion that it wasn't so much the perceived recession or
the tragedy in the United States bur rather, the inconvenience caused by
RAI's squirting canapés to which the disappointing overall sales on PAN's
opening night should be attributed - although these very canapés would be
the perfect choice of dish for my pretend restaurant, which I look forward
to providing you with a follow-up report on some time in the very near future.
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