If you’re a fan of “Top Chef,” you may wonder what it’s like to be a judge, to hold that kind of mandarin’s power in your hands. We’re offering that opportunity, though on a small-batch scale. We also could use your help. Thankfully, this being a TFS event—and our first ever in Charlotte, not counting our TFS:CLT launch party in March—it should be all kinds of fun for everybody.
You’ll get to taste things. You’ll be able to drink award-winning beer and eat (we hear) really good pizza. If you want, you can even bring your dog. And after all that, you can play trivia—with at least one round focused on food and drink from the Carolinas. It’s free, too. (It is subscriber-only, though, and neither beer nor pizza is included for that low, low price.) It’ll be from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday, May 28, at NoDa Brewing Company, 150 W. 32nd St.
This party took some planning. A bit of backstory: This year, TFS founder Hanna Raskin launched TFS: Mercantile, an online store that sells artisanal products from food vendors throughout the South. Vendors offer their products, like small-batch mustards and preserves; you buy; TFS gets a small cut of the sale. It’s a great way to boost small vendors and help both them and us make money. But Hanna, of course, wants to sell only high-quality products from vendors she knows and trusts. That’s why, as of this writing, TFS: Mercantile has only five items on its digital shelf.
She wanted more. So, Hanna touched base with the folks at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, the force behind the state’s Got to Be NC program, and the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, which administers Certified SC Grown. They referred their members, and they responded—overwhelmingly. Hanna can’t taste-test all of these products. Neither can we. And this is where you can help us, through the altruistic practice of tasting food and drink, then judging it.
Hanna thought: Let’s get our subscribers to taste and rate them. Where? Charlotte, close to the state line. OK, where specifically? A brewery might be fun. I’m familiar with those. One came quickly to mind: NoDa Brewing. It’s one of Charlotte’s O.G. breweries, founded in 2011. It moved to a big space on well-traveled North Tryon Street four years later. Great beer, lots of parking, dog-friendly, and there’s a cool events pavilion out back. All good.
What neither Hanna nor I knew was that Suzie Ford, a co-founder (with her husband, Todd, and Chad Henderson, the head brewer), is a huge fan of local goods produced by small vendors. For example, the Fords have done some beer collaborations with Robert Moreland of Brew and Feed in Concord, which also sells things like spice blends and craft sodas with regionally produced ingredients, like honey. (Robert probably can’t make it, but he gave me a bag of sodas and hot sauces I’ll bring to the event.) In short, Suzie immediately fell for the idea.
“I just love anything local,” Suzie told me. “I love the creativity of this event. It’s so different from anything I’ve heard of.”
In fact, it was Suzie’s idea to pair our event with NoDa’s weekly Thursday trivia night, which starts at 7 p.m., just as we’d planned to wrap up our event. So why not work in some Carolinas food-related trivia questions? Kathleen sent a list of distinctively Carolinian foods and beverages (example: Texas Pete) to Jacob Gresham of Mindless Minutia, the Charlotte-based company NoDa Brewing uses for its trivia nights.
Jacob said the list is good for at least one round of food trivia, maybe two. Mindless does four rounds with 11 questions in each round; the last question in the round earns you two points. Jacob won’t be the quizmaster, though. A gentleman with the delightful name George Swanke (pronounced “swanky”) will deliver the questions and banter. “He’s an ace,” Jacob said.
Jacob said he founded Mindless in 2018 but has never done a whole round devoted to food. “It’ll be great. There are plenty of things out there that people will know,” he said. “It’s always cool to do a round on something you’ve never done before.”
Here’s to novelty, and to the tastes of the Carolinas. Y’all come on out. It should be a ball.
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