by Keri O’Meara
This year’s Fashion Cares promises to up the glamour and glitz quota. Taking place the day after Halloween the event is based around the theme “Hitchcock meets Haute Couture.” To contribute to the extravagance, Fashion Cares will be a gala dinner. Picture tastefully over the top dinner the-ahhh-ter: tables with centre pieces that would make Tippi Hedrin Scream.

The Chair of Fashion Cares, Michael King, wanted to make sure the dinner menu was just as fabulous as the rest of the evening. “People have paid a lot of money for these tickets and it would be disrespectful to serve them something less than special… The food is part of the whole experience.”

Fashion Cares is being held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre where executive Chef Angelo Fernandez and his staff will have to prepare a three course meal for twelve hundred and fifty of Toronto’s most fantastic, fabulous and finicky people.

King is not worried not worried about how Canada’s elite will respond to Chef Angelo’s menu. “The fashion crowd are hard critics….But I think people will be blown away,” he says.

Last week I got to sit down with the shy Chef and the dashing Fashion Cares Chair for a taste of what Toronto’s fashionista’s will be dining on at the event. While I am no fashion elite (YET) and certainly cannot afford a 10,000 dollar dinner I do have discerning culinary tastes.

We started with a wonton wrapped seaweed cigar packed full with perfectly sweet leeks and meaty shitake mushroom served on mixed greens with rice wine vinaigrette.

Seaweed and leeks are not quite Halloween, let alone fall, but as King explains the cigar is an ode to the heavy smoking master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock.

Next, we are served sliced and roasted Striploin cooked a perfect medium rare- no steak knife required- with gratin like tower of Yukon and sweet potato’s. Bright yellow patty pans, baby carrots, and snow peas adorn the plate. How the chef and his team will cook these fall coloured vegetables with that subtle crunch on the outside, for 1250 people is a Hitchcockian suspense.

Finally two deserts are put in front of me: A chocolate dipped poached pair with delicious chestnut puree filling and, a chocolate tulip cup filled with raspberry chocolate mousse. The only think scary about these deserts is the fear that I might have to undo the top button of my jeans.