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8/28/2007 | Testimonial: Richard Brandsetter, owner, Bourbon House & Pizza
Burlington
,
Kentucky
The main reason we came to the show was to enter (Pizza Pizzazz), which went pretty well for us; we finished eleventh with a traditional
Chicago
deep-dish. It wasn’t easy, though, because it was our first time in the competition.
Normally, we use a conveyor oven to bake our pizzas, but we had to use a deck oven, which put us in experimental mode, if you will. In the end, the pizza looked great and tasted great, and it even scored over 700 points. One of the (officials) told us that kind of a score normally would have put us in the top five, but it didn’t this year. He was really nice, though, and told us if we did that well on our first try, we shouldn’t get discouraged and definitely come back next year.
I guess scoring that high but not finishing higher said a lot about how good the competition was this year. I know we looked around at the others’ and saw a lot of good pizzas.
One of the most helpful things about the show was meeting a lot of nice people and seeing different products. It keeps you in touch with what’s going on in the industry.
We spoke with a lot of different vendors, including Fontanini, who we now do a lot of business with. They were able to find me a gonella roll (sort of a cross between a soft sub roll and French bread) that, in
Chicago
, where I’m from, you use for roast beef sandwiches and Polish sausages. Fontanini also had some really good Italian sausage, Italian beef and pot roast that we liked.
Having a show this close to where we are (about 100 miles away) is a huge help. There’s no way we could close up shop for several days and head out to
Las Vegas
. Of course, it would be nicer if it were at the
Northern
Kentucky
Convention Center
… .
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