Where We Shop

A few of us ladies in charge at the Quiet Storm (or, as we call ourselves, HBIC) attended the restaurant & foodservice expo yesterday, a benefit of membership in the Pennsylvania Restaurant Association. It’s an opportunity to sample food & drink, to ogle brand-spanking-new kitchen equipment, and to collect information about payroll, credit card, financial and marketing services.

Mostly, we drank. (We thought the Trippel from Church Brew Works was tasty, but had to sample three or four to be certain. We decided that it was very, very good.)

The expo is sponsored by US Foodservice, whose motto, “as passionate about food as you are,” is true if by food you mean “fried stuff” and/or “meat.” We believe it’s every American’s right to enjoy jalapeño poppers and buffalo wings and baby back ribs… eat and let eat, we say. But this stuff has little use for us professionally.

The Quiet Storm, as you probably know, is mostly vegan & all vegetarian. What you may not know is that we don’t have a fryer (or a grill, for that matter). We bake, roast, poach, braise, simmer and double-boil, but we don’t fry.

And we prepare almost everything on the menu from scratch. We get our food from the Restaurant Depot, Frankferd Farms, Reyna’s, Lotus Foods, Penn Mac, Stamoolis, Stan’s, the East End Food Co-op, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and seasonally, from Kretschmann Farm and area farmer’s markets.

We’re glad to have gone, and we were psyched to meet lots of folks who knew about or had been to the Quiet Storm, a delightful change from previous years. But we probably won’t do the expo next year.