Ottawa City Hall hosted its first-ever Mac My Cheese Festival from Oct. 2-4 at the Festival Plaza. Tents, tables, and chairs were set up, vendor trucks were parked and ready to go, and the smell of cheese in the air foreshadowed a wonderful experience ahead.
The food festival featured 15 vendors, live music, and people eating a whole lot of mac and cheese. Vendors presented a variety of twists on the classic dish, throwing every trick out of the hat with their talents.
“These type of foodie experiences really bring people together,” said organizer Les Gagne.
Gagne said macaroni and cheese is a food Canada has come to love, yet no one has experimented with it very much. He said the festival aims to change this.
Highlights included The Upper Deck Diner, which was home to the most uncommon dish of the weekend, the Halifax Donair. It was just cheesy enough, and was given a great twist with its sweet garlic sauce—just slightly too sweet for a cheesy meal, I’d say. They compensated with an interesting “dine upstairs” concept, where customers could order and collect their meal at the truck window before going into and on top of the bus to sit and dine.
On the other hand, Culinary Meltdown was a pig-tastic delight, with different variations of pork incorporated into their mac and cheese dishes. It was a definite swine-and-dine spot, especially for bacon lovers.
“I liked it, but one truck only had limited choices of just pork, which wasn’t accessible to me as a Muslim. There wasn’t a large diversity to choose from in that sense,” first-year Carleton student Nadine Mourad said.
The live entertainment featured local artists and bands coming out to show their support and hoped to make an impact on the community.
“A lot of local artists are looking for places to play, so festivals like this now give them a chance and a platform to be exposed to a lot of people, versus playing at a bar with 40 people, which are mostly their friends,” Gagne said.
Gagne also teased a future event.
“I’ll give you a hint of one of the things we’re doing. It’s going to be somewhere in June next year, and I believe we’re going to do a music festival with a food that’s in the shape of a ball,” Gagne said. “And if you think about it, all foods can basically be made into a ball.”
