The Holiday Flavours of Red Bank

On December 5th, 2013, Red Bank Flavour hosted it’s traditional winter event, the Holiday Flavour at the Molly Pitcher Inn. Like always, this was an exquisite culinary affair that featured food and drink samples from almost 30 of the town’s best restaurants. A portion of the evening’s proceeds also benefited The Parker Family Health Center, Red Bank PBA Local 39′s McCarthy’s Children Fund and the Red Bank Flavour Culinary Alliance.

You can see more pictures from this event in our Facebook album.

This time I started (not sure if it’s the right away) with desserts, because some of them were welcoming you right at the door, and I just couldn’t help it… So here’s how my night started:

• The new Carlo’s Bakery (owned by Buddy “The Cake Boss” Valastro) had a nice spread of delicious cakes, my favorite being the chocolate ones.
• Another new sweet shop, Whipped, served amazing crepes with chocolate, as well as some cupcakes.
• Sugarush had its usual big variety of sweets, and I especially liked the chocolate-dipped sticks.
• Lil Cutie Pops is known for it’s funny, cartoon-character themed cake pops, but for this event they brought sugary and red velvet pops, with a Christmas ornament theme.
• Another Flavour staple, Melting Pot delighted guests at the door with their famous chocolate fondue.
• Finally, there was some fine gelato from Sicilia Cafe.

Loaded with sweets, I was really struggling when I switched to regular food. So I’m first going to talk about the food samples that I tried. And for the first time, I’m even going to try to rank them in the order of my favorites. This is not easy since I really enjoyed all of them and had second servings of most of these dishes, but let me try:

• It’s the first time I head about JR’s and their sirloin burgers with pineapple was without doubt my favorite of the night!
• Anthony from Dish cut and served the always amazing slow cooked ribs, this time with gorgonzola.
• Oyster Point was as good, with their beef short ribs sauerbraten with butternut squash gnocchi.
• Danny’s Steakhouse offered the best of both worlds: sushi rolls topped with steak.
• Red Bank Sub Shop had some very good Boars Head subs, including oven gold turkey with provolone and roast beef with mozzarella.
• Siam Garden served spicy chicken curry with rice (my favorite) and a few other Thai specialties.
• Readies had very good Swedish meatballs with pasta.
• New Corner Italian Restaurant offered several pasta dishes, and I really liked the penne vodka.

So far, it may not seem like much, but when you add up decent-sized servings of everything I mentioned so far, you get full pretty quickly. So unfortunately, I really couldn’t taste all the great food at the event, but here’s the best of the rest (I’ve tried most of these outstanding restaurants before, so I can almost guarantee they’re very good):

• Teak had dumplings and spring rolls.
• Boondocks served it’s signature Lobster salad.
• Tommy’s Coal Fired offered spicy wings with meatballs.
• Gaetano’s had homemade shells & roasted eggplant with fileto di pomodoro.
• Molly Pitcher Inn served slow cooked pork with shaved brussel sprouts, cranberry and chestnuts.
• Front St Trattoria offered grilled asparagus with red peppers and saffron rissoto.
• Pazzo served spicy meatballs.

Every Flavour event also has drink samples from some of the restaurants, but this time it was mostly from independent distributors:

• Downtown poured nice pear martinis and cosmos.
• I loved the shots of Lemon Crop Organic Vodka but they also had pumpkin spice flavors.
• Ubons had some very strange BBQ-flavored Bloody Mary… not bad, very unique.
• There were also several wine offerings, including The Show cabernet sauvignon, the Chateau St Jean wines from R&R Distributors and Matua from New Zeeland

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