Festival to celebrate R.I.’s culinary treasures

SOMETHING TO CHEW ON: Event organizer David Dadekian is hoping the upcoming inaugural Eat Drink RI Festival will raise the profile of the local restaurant industry. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
SOMETHING TO CHEW ON: Event organizer David Dadekian is hoping the upcoming inaugural Eat Drink RI Festival will raise the profile of the local restaurant industry. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

When is Rhode Island going to get its just deserts, when it comes to desserts and other fine edibles?
“There are still a lot of people, the vast majority I’m sure, who don’t know how many fantastic things are going on here,” said David Dadekian, founder of Eat Drink RI, a popular local foodie website. “The bottom line is [we have to] let people know what’s here.”
Dadekian is hoping the upcoming inaugural Eat Drink RI Festival, happening downtown at various locations April 19-21, will make giant strides in getting there.
The festival will have three days of events all aimed at showcasing the state’s culinary treasures and trends. Providence has long marketed its vast culinary offerings as a major tourism draw, pointing particularly to the cuisine of Federal Hill, numerous local wineries and an accelerating focus on farm-to-table service.
“This is something that we really wanted to have for a long time,” said Kristen Adamo, vice president of marketing and communications for the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau. “I think now is the perfect time. We’re really starting to get more of that national attention.”
Rhode Island has made some foodie news of late. Travel + Leisure in November 2012 named Providence America’s best “foodie city.” The magazine last month named it the second-best city in the country for pizza, behind Chicago’s famed deep-dish pies.
In February, the James Beard Foundation announced that Matt Jennings of Farmstead Inc. and Champe Speidel of Bristol’s Persimmon are in the running for Best Chef: Northeast and that Providence’s Cook & Brown Public House is listed as a semifinalist in the Outstanding Bar Program category.
“I think it’s been growing over the past five years and I feel we’re reaching a plateau,” said Adamo, who is serving on the festival committee. “Instead of up and coming, it’s almost as if we’ve arrived as a culinary destination.”
But Providence, and the state as a whole, has not yet had a lot of success with food and drink festivals, which often draw criticism for being poorly organized, overcrowded and without a wide variety of vendors and activities. Brendan Roane, director of marketing and events for Gracie’s in Providence, two years ago helped to run a small festival that was put together in haste and, while he called it a success, he acknowledges more planning was needed to put on a show that would make people want to come back.
Roane has known Dadekian for several years through the restaurant industry. Roane approached Dadekian about helping to establish a festival that could be seen as a community coming together instead of a corporate-run event.
“I’m a big supporter of the arts in general. Food is an art,” Roane said. “We know Rhode Island has a great [food] scene. But we need to see it together.”
That’s long been the focus of Dadekian’s work.
A Cranston native, he moved to New York City for college in the late 1980s and worked there in the entertainment business until returning to Rhode Island in 2003 hoping to capture, as a self-employed writer and photographer, a piece of the growth he’d witnessed in Providence during the 1990s.
He slowly became more and more involved in the restaurant business and made friends within the industry.
“In New York City I ate very well and I always cooked,” Dadekian said. “So I became a food photographer and writer.”
He launched Eat Drink RI at the end of 2010. The website focuses on the local food community and especially on Rhode Island farmers, chefs and food producers.
“Our restaurants are very well-known, but the people behind the products that the restaurants serve are a huge part of that,” he said.
The site includes a list of wine and food events throughout the New England region and many news items written by Dadekian.
“We are fortunate to be so close to so many things. I started the site as an outlet to enhance what I was doing freelance-wise,” he said.
Roane recruited Dadekian to take part in the food festival that was held in August 2011. While there was some expressed interest in a repeat event nothing ever materialized and Roane suggested the two rename the event the Eat Drink RI Festival. “The big, grand plan is that this is the first of an annual event. I know we have the capability to grow because I’ve had to turn people away from some of these events,” he said.
The festival includes the Truck Stop to Benefit the Rhode Island Community Food Bank at the Bank of America Center at Kennedy Plaza on April 19, with tastings from 10 Rhode Island mobile restaurants and pairings from Jonathan Edwards Winery and Narragansett Brewery. That day there also will be a cocktail couture event at the Providence Biltmore Garden Room.
On Saturday, April 20 there will be education panels at the Providence Biltmore centered on “the essential know-how’s of cooking in Rhode Island,” on eating local, embracing the flavors of New England earth, and brewing in Rhode Island. That night there will be a grand tasting at the Providence Biltmore.
The festival will close with The Grand Brunch on Sunday, April 21, at Gracie’s.
“The bottom line [in organizing], was how do we involve so many great people. If we just did a grand tasting, that leaves the restaurants and farmers out of things,” Dadekian said. “We wanted a cocktail event and to put together a number of things that would appeal to the public as much as we could.”
Roane said he and Dadekian have been working well together, blending their talents as organizing aficionado and foodie enthusiast respectively.
Roane said he has a wine and spirits background and has been able to focus on organizing the events.
“I’ve tried to take my knowledge of events and really showcase the local bartenders. It was thinking how we can make three days in Rhode Island focused on highlighting the local chefs and really looking at the culinary scene as a form of art and creating a festival around it,” he said. •

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