Entertainment » Food Fight

Don't miss the 3rd annual Food Fight! cooking competition. This "Iron Chef" style competition will be an exciting part of the 2013 Richmond Vegetarian Festival - don't miss it!

The competition was previously known as Meatless Gourmet, but we think Food Fight! is a better fit. It's fast-paced, head-to-head, and the food is flying.

WHEN: 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

WHERE: Speakers' Tent

Three of the Richmond area's up-and-coming chefs will battle it out to see who will reign as the Food Fight Champion 2013! They will be given 60 minutes to prepare 3 dishes each to be judged by our esteemed judging panel. With help from their sous chefs, the competitors will live up to their expectations and the taste-buds of the judges in an outdoor kitchen with limited equipment. But there's an even bigger catch: their dishes must highlight the Secret Ingredient which no one will know until the moment the clock starts ticking.

This is sure to be a fast-paced and exciting event. A perfect complement to your day at the Festival.

Check out previous fights...

Food Fight 2012

Food Fight 2011

Food Fight 2013

The Competitors

Todd Brady

The remaining competitors will be posted soon!

The Judges

Joe Yonan

Washington Post Food Editor

JoeYonan.com

Joe Yonan is the two-time James Beard Award-winning Food and Travel editor of The Washington Post and the author of “Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One,” which Serious Eats called “a truly thoughtful, useful, and incredibly delicious book.” He was a food writer and Travel section editor at The Boston Globe before moving to Washington in 2006 to edit the Post’s Food section, for which he also writes the monthly Cooking for One column and occasional feature stories. His work from the Globe and Post has appeared in three editions of the “Best Food Writing” anthology. Joe spent 2012 in North Berwick, Maine, on leave from the Post to learn about growing and homesteading from his sister and brother-in-law and to work on more book projects, including the upcoming “Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook” (Ten Speed Press, August 2013).

John Haddad

Epicuriousity.net

John Haddad is a food writer in Richmond and Vice Chair of Slow Food RVA. Find him at Epicuriousity.net, @Epicuriousity on Twitter, or slowfoodrva.org. John is obsessed with food. He is tormented, transfixed, seduced, beguiled and smitten by it. Savory more than sweet, spicy more than hot and local and seasonal more than not. When he is not eating, he is reading about food, shopping for food, watching television shows about it, photographing it or writing about it.

Maya Vincelli

University of Richmond - Dining Services

Maya is a born and bred Richmonder who has had a focus on food since her earliest days of backyard gardens and birthday cakes. Her working life has been entirely in food service, holding more than 25 jobs doing everything from making ice cream to roasting coffee to being a sous chef and more. She is passionate about good food, local food, and supports local growers and food preparers in her own kitchen as well as in her professional life. She is the Assistant Director of Retail Operations for University of Richmond Dining Services, overseeing five busy campus cafes and upscale convenience stores. In her spare time, she continues work on her history degree, blogs about food, cooks for friends and family, and responds to the daily needs of her rescued border collie mix Pepper and her black cat Flapjack.

The Food Moderator

Our food moderator fills a very important role - bringing the audience along as we watch the chefs transform the secret ingredient into their masterful creations. He will be guiding you and us through the ingredients, the preparation, and the judges' reactions.

Jason Guard

Website: RVAfoodie.com

Jason Guard writes about food at RVAfoodie.com and delights in the trial and error of creative cooking in his home kitchen. For six years, he cooked vegan meals for Richmond's underpriviliged with Food Not Bombs.

He went vegetarian in high school, and has mostly stayed the course ever since, developing real preoccupations with vegan fare, raw foods, pizza from scratch, and most recently, beer.

The Rules

Basic Structure:

3 Chef Competitors
3 Industry Judges
1 Judge Chosen from Audience
60 minutes for cooking

Cooking Guidelines:

Each chef will work with a sous chef of their choosing
Each chef must prepare 3 dishes
Each dish should incorporate and highlight the Secret Ingredient
The 60 minute clock starts at the moment that the Secret Ingredient is revealed to the competitors, judges, and audience.
Only food that is plated at the end of 60 minutes will be judged.

Scoring:

Each judge gives a score to each dish with the following scoring ranges:

	Category		Maximum Score
	Taste		8
	Presentation		4
	Innovation / Uniqueness		4
	Use of Secret Ingredient		4

Therefore each competitor will have a final score between 0 and 240.

Food Fight is a cooking competition run by the Richmond Vegetarian Festival and is an Affiliate of the Vegan Iron Chef network.