I don’t remember if I saw those booths or not, but I’ll keep those names in mind. :-)

I was prepared for the worst at the Taste Pavilion, especially since we arrived to a 4 block line before entering. But once in, we were able to sample pretty much every pavilion without too much hassle. Sure there were some longer waits, particularly for ice cream and wine, but nothing I’d call unreasonable. We entered the cheese tasting line when it was out the door…but still managed to clear the whole thing in under 10 mins. We ate until we were content and even managed to have enough slow bucks leftover to take home a good amount of chocolates.

In any case, timing and luck certainly played a role…but there were definitely gems to be found. Arnold, did you happen to catch the Benton’s hams or the Salumi Artisan Cured Meats booths? Both were rare treats in our neck of the woods.

We went to the event on Sunday night. It was a total ripoff. For the $120 we spent, we could have had a great dinner at Millennium. It would have taken about as long, too, except that we would have been comfortably lingering over our wine instead of jockeying for position in lines. The lines were so long (and so poorly marked) that we didn’t even make it to four of the pavilions, and we got there at 5:45PM. Of course, it didn’t help that they made the classy, CLASSY move of shutting down the Gelato and the Coffee pavilion at five-minutes-til-closing. I mean, who out there paying $120 for a food event would ever want to have ice cream and coffee at the end of the evening? This was a total ripoff and I can’t believe that I got suckered into paying $120 to stand in line at a giant infomercial.