Last week, my work department in Toronto got an opportunity to try a tasting event at St. Lawrence Market as a team building event. Food tasting as a team building event? Yes! Food and socializing go great together. In the past quarterly events, we had done too many "Escape Room" activities and the teams wanted to try something different for this year.

Format of the Tasting Event:
We had negotiated with a couple vendors to provide small snacks/meals to our teams. We moved together as a large group as we explored St. Lawrence market inside. Originally, we had try to organize directly with the St. Lawrence Market staff since they had an official Taste of St. Lawrence event recently. Unfortunately, they were not co-operative (took like 2 weeks for them to respond to emails) and not competitive in pricing ($20 per person just history lesson). The vendors were very quick (responded to emails at 6 am) and provided creative options.

Vendor #1: Scheffler's Delicatessen and Cheese 
 The staff had provided us a sampling taste menu of their popular food items:

• Parma Prosciutto 18mpnts
• Sweet Drop (pickles peppers from Peru)
• Cerignola Olives
• Kalamata Olives
• Casalingo 
• 5 year old Canadian cheddar 
• Dolamdes
• Sundries Tomato Provolone stuffed

From the tasting menu, I found the Sweet Drops from Peru to be amazing. They were very sweet for a pickle pepper and shaped like a raindrop.  Recommended to be used on anything including salads. I recalled it cost about $4.5 per 100 grams in a closed jar. 




Vendor #2: Wine Country Merchants

Our team got to sample a couple wines across the country including some from Niagara and BC. I was surprised to find out that there was Gretzky Estates Wines. 



Vendor #3: Kozliks Mustard
Kozliks Canadian Mustard was established in 1948 and has remained family owned and operated to this day, producing hand-made mustard in small batches. I had bought some of their mustard before and had always seen them distributing pretzel sticks to sample their wide ranges of mustard.

However, I had no idea that they actually sold mustard bread!! It was officially called "Mustard Stick" and they are only sold on weekends. However, the owner made a special deal with us to sample it on a weekday. The mustard stick was made from bread dough combined with mustard seeds and Dijon mustard and lots of cheese. In the end, the bread tasted like an amazing cheese stick with more complex flavours due to the mustard. 

These were hot stuff especially the one on the right.

 

Mustard Sticks! I think it was 3 for $10

 Vendor #4 - Uno Mustachio
 

Eggplant Sandwich was so huge! Most of the people who had ordered this could only finish half of it.

I was craving steak and order that ... should have got the veal next time!!

 Vendor #5:  Golden Orchard Fine Foods
They were one of the popular supermarket vendors that sold organic and non organic vegetables and fruits. For our visit, the vendor had specially prepared pre-cut fruit packages just for us. Some customers became very curious and wanted to acquire some as well! 

A lot of organic foods in here

They normally never make any precut fruit packages to sell.

Vendor #6: Everyday Gourmet

got a small mocha with pattern

After this, we were done for the tasting event and headed back to work for the rest of the day. It was unfortunate that we were stuck in traffic for 1 hour going back ... (thanks DVP)

Name:	St. Lawrence Market
Address:	92-95 Front St E, Toronto, ON M5E 1C3
Phone:	(416) 392-7219
Website:	www.stlawrencemarket.com/
Hours:	Sunday CLOSED Monday CLOSED Tuesday 8AM–6PM Wednesday 8AM–6PM Thursday 8AM–6PM Friday 8AM–6PM Saturday 5AM–5PM
Map: