Le Bernardin: Duckathlon NYC Restaurant Industry Showdown!

I am not just a little bitter that we lost the annual d'Artagnan Duckathlon Industry Contest: I am OUTRAGED!!!! 

 This competition is just for fun, organized by D'Artagnan, a food distributer who is famous for specialty products. Foie gras, truffles, game, organic turkeys, jambon, saucisson sec – you name it, they supply it.

All the top restaurants in NYC rely on d'Artagnan for quality ingredients. Each team (restaurant) is given a list of different shops and restaurants to find in the Meat Packing district. At each stop there is a different challenge. Including: olive oil tastings, blindfolded guess-the-spice games, and French-English translation tests (we lost this event even with 3 native French people on the team).

 Some of the craziest contests included dunking a sausage tied around the waist by a thin string while dressed in a bra and hoop skirt into a milk pale as many times as possible in one minute.

The hoop skirt which you can see behind the sausage in the photo above, I'm assuming, keeps the contestant from watching the exact placement of the sausage so team members have to aid in direction. What the DD bra over the clothes has to do with

anything is a mystery…

And the Ball Busters table where cooks had to match the animal to the correct testicle. I was not good at this. However I did learn that ostriches have large testicles.

And I also scored the bonus point: name the pink fleshy thing…

My sous chef was shocked. Whatever, I'm a woman, there are some things we inherently understand. Now if I had to tell you what animal it came from, that would be a different story. And of course we also had some fun walking in between shops, bars, and restaurants…

and taking refreshments along the way…

 Where we failed completely was the final competition where all the restaurants (Restaurant Daniel, Le Cirque, Cercle Rouge, and Bar Bouley included) gathered around a stage (next to an open bar) in the Chelsea Market and one by one performed a song about food. We did not pull our song together in time. Our attempted version of "God Bless Foie Gras" to the tune of "God Bless America" bombed.

Next year I think we'll plan it out in advance like the team from Restaurant Daniel who clearly spent hours orchestrating their performance. (losers). Okay, we got booed off the stage. In fact, we had things thrown at us. Yes, little plastic ducks were literally thrown at us on the stage. It got really bad when we started to throw them back.

Big kisses to Adrien who performed the song. We all just stood behind him with our hands on our hearts as we hummed along and dodged flying objects. Nonetheless we won one of the competitions (every restaurant wins something). We won the prestigious Sausage Dunking Competition thanks to Camille!!!!!!

To quote my friend: "Mais oui, je suis Française." We walked away with some magnificent prizes including one enormous jambon de Bayonne and two enormous sausages

I barely walked away. Too much Moet.

Totally worth it. I suppose sometimes you have to take one for the team.