On Thursday, I attended Jyoti Gondek‘s Ward 3 meeting at Tudor Rose in Panorama Hills. At the previous meeting, two rounds of food were ordered. I noticed that the majority of the second round was uneaten. The Chinese in me couldn’t let this wastage go on. I told Jyoti I wanted to be in charge of ordering all the food for all functions and meetings.

Part of the problem of ordering is that you never know how many people are going to show up. Most volunteers don’t know if they can go until the last-minute. When I placed the initial order, there were six people at the table. By the time the food arrived, we were at 15. I would just add an additional dish as more people came in.

I ordered three Tudor Rose Platters ($33), three nacho platters ($16) and four 8″ two-topping pizzas ($8.50, a special that night). The platters offer variety and good value.

You can pick three select appetizers for the Tudor Rose Platter, plus fries. The chicken fingers were good – the beer batter was a nice change from the usual breadcrumbs and the meat was cut into strips similar to the size in fish and chips. The calamari was my favourite. Each platter got a ton of these tender, lightly fried squid.  The fries were tasty.

I ordered nachos without meat, so that the vegetarians at the table had something to nibble on. When I order for groups, I try to avoid ordering food with pork and when I pick meats, it’s always chicken and beef. I don’t normally like nachos because I find them dry. These nachos were the exception. The cheese was soft and gooey and remained so for a long time.

Small pizzas were on special that night. I picked cheese pizza, Hawaiian and ham, and sausage and mushroom. Tudor Rose is one of Jyoti’s favourite places for pizza.

I asked our server to stagger the food on the table. I would get up and move dishes around so the volunteers could try different flavoured wings and pizzas. Some volunteers demolished the nachos but wouldn’t touch other dishes, so I would rotate food in and out. At the end of the night, there was only a small amount of nachos leftover and everyone was stuffed. Mission accomplished!

The staff were friendly and the manager even came over at the end to ask how everything was and thank us for the business. Our server was excellent at remembering everything we ordered and did a fantastic job.

I’m excited to help out for Jyoti’s future campaign events. I’m going to hunt for unusual spaces, restaurants and food trucks. If you have any suggestions for venues in Ward 3 or elsewhere in the city, let me know.