Tiana brought me as her guest to the Ottawa Foodies pot luck, run by Pam¹, and held on a rooftop patio right on Bank Street. It was a true potluck, where no one knew what any­one else was bring­ing.

The Ottawa Foodies usu­al­ly gath­er in the Ottawa Foodie forums, where they dis­cuss recipes and restau­rants in Ottawa, so this was the first in-per­son meet­ing for many. Many did­n’t know each oth­ers real names, so there were intro­duc­tions like, “Hi, I’m MissMuffins862”, or ‚“Hi, I’m Thomas, aka BagelRapist”.

I don’t think Tiana was quite ready for the food dorks, the type of which I was already some­what accus­tomed to dur­ing my time at the com­put­er sci­ence pro­gram at Ottawa U. I’ve deter­mined that food dorks are just as bad as wine snobs and com­put­er geeks. For exam­ple:

There were two guys who got into a heat­ed argu­ment about the kind of fat used in Mcdonald’s french fries. One of these guys also preached to me about the ben­e­fits of good rice, (and me — being Chinese — knew absolute­ly noth­ing about rice). There was one guy who said, “I’m doing a doc­u­men­tary on the youngest head chef in the ———- region”. I asked “Wow, how did he get that posi­tion?”, and his reply was “His par­ents own the restau­rant”. Then real­iz­ing the fact that nepo­tism ruins the cred­i­bil­i­ty of his ini­tial state­ment, he fol­lowed this with “He also made a flow­er­less brown­ie at 11.” Tiana asked, “Did he invent it?”. “No, he fol­lowed a recipe”. At that point, Tiana and got silent and we just looked at each oth­er.

But what some of these peo­ple lack in social skills, they make up for in culi­nary abil­i­ties, and the food was amaz­ing.

So I basi­cal­ly hung out with Tiana the whole time, and pigged out on every­thing I could. By the end of the night, my truf­fles, usu­al­ly rolled in coco pow­der to pre­vent them from stick­ing to each oth­er, had turned into a truf­fle.

1. Who also hap­pens to know Tim. Ottawa is real­ly small. [↩]