Blog posts tagged with 'crystal stemware'

For those of our readers in Canada, Happy belated Canada day! Hope you enjoyed some rest with your friends and family while celebrating a wonderful nation. For our American neighbours, Happy Independence Day! Make sure you take some time to celebrate the stars and stripes and count all the ways you’re grateful for your fantastic land of dreams. This month has brought some pretty atrocious weather to the entire North American continent. Arizona is currently fighting a deadly wildfire that has already claimed the life of 19 firefighters. To help out in any way, you can check out this article on ways to donate. Calgary, Alberta is currently cleaning up and rebuilding from the flood that left the city and surrounding areas covered in water. To express your support, you can check out this article on ways to donate. In terms of news though, this month has been chalk full of new trends and more positive tactics to use in your everyday life.

Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, with more than 65 luxury properties around the globe has released its take on the cocktail trends for the remainder of 2013. Having bars that have created some of the most famous cocktails (the Mai Tai and White Lady to name a couple), Fairmont steps behind the bar to give us their take of what they’re seeing as cocktail trends. Check out this article for some hints on the top trends to tempt taste buds. And if you need some crystal for your cocktails, check out our Serenity Crystal Stemware.

Go behind the scenes in the world’s best restaurant, El Cellar de Can Roca. This video—just over 5 minutes—is worth the look. Apparently the smoke-in-blown-sugar ball that’s part of dessert is out of this world.

Get that social media is the future but not getting the internal buy in? Check out this article from Exhibitor Magazine about how to overcome internal resistance to social media marketing. With Twitter’s active user base generating 90 million tweets (and climbing) a day, it’s in your best interests to lead the pack with social media marketing that has endless possibilities and limited cost.

A Canada Day Long Weekend, like an Independence Day Long Weekend, is a great time to kick back and relax with friends and family. While the weather forecasters were calling for rain here in Toronto, we managed to have a fantastic sunny and warm weekend.

With an extra day tacked onto the weekend, I managed to find some free time to make some ribs which is unfortunately an all too infrequent event. Since I had most of the day to kill, I decided to do things the right way, low and slow. I cooked them for 6 hours on the BBQ at about 200F with mostly indirect heat. Nothing too fancy, just some Chicken and Rib BBQ Sauce applied a few times, starting at about 2 hours to go.

Ribs with 2 Hours to Go	Finished Ribs with Red Wine

The result was fantastic (if I do say so myself!). I plated the two racks of ribs on our A0958 – 9x14 Rectangular Platter, as you can see they fit perfectly, then served with red wine (in our 19oz Serenity Crystal Wine Glass).

Spending some time around the BBQ made for a great relaxing day and the perfect end to a long weekend!I hope you had a great Canada and for our American friends, I hope you have a great Independence Day.

Although this isn’t the 100th blog post (it’s the 102nd), we wanted to mark the occasion of our 100th blog post. It’s been a little over 2 years since we revised the website and introduced our blog. During that time, we’ve introduced dozens of new products, travelled North America visiting trade shows from Vancouver to New Orleans and from Toronto to Las Vegas. All of which is incredible blogging material!

NEW PRODUCTS

Just recently, we’ve introduced our Mahogany Resin Folding Chair and our Polar White Dinnerware. Last fall, we added Wing Bowls and Wood Harvest Tables at the request of customers who had a need for these products. Last summer we began offering our new Crystal Stemware and Glass Stemware to great demand. The common denominator for all these products is that we introduced them in our blog before we managed to get individual product pages up. The blog is the perfect place get your first glance at our new Chiavari Chair Cart and our new amuse bouche fork and spoon.

In the future, we’ll continue introducing our new products on our blog. In addition, we’ll be providing information about our existing products, like our beautiful selection of Champagne Fountains, Chocolate Fountains, and Cupcake Stands. We’ll also be doing more videos showing how strong our products are by show just what it takes to destroy them.

NEW LANGUAGE

We teased a French version of our website about a month ago. Now we ready to launch it! We’re initially launching the product pages first, and we hope to add translated versions of blog articles within a day of the English language blog article being posted. The translation of the website is all due to the hard work of our French sales rep Stephanie Loiselle. She has put long hours into first translating the website and then fixing any errors I may have introduced pulling the pages together. Merci Beaucoup, Stephanie!

This past weekend I had the pleasure of exhibiting at the 2013 CRA Prairie Regional Trade Show in Saskatoon. Because we are still pretty much in the thick of winter for many parts of Canada, I flew into Saskatoon on Thursday just to make sure I wouldn’t have any weather related issues getting to the Prairieland Exhibition Centre and getting set up in time for the show.

I made it with no issues although I will admit it was pretty darn cold and there was lots of snow everywhere. I met up for dinner with our National Event Supply Western Canada sales team at our usual haunt, Chianti’s Café on Idylwild and 22st St East, which is just a few short blocks from our Radisson Hotel Saskatoon. Here I thought it was the only location that Chianti’s Café had—it turns out they have 7 restaurants in Calgary, Edmonton, and Saskatoon. And from how busy it was on Thursday, we can definitely say the food is always great.

Friday morning we woke up to a light snowfall and only -12C and headed over to the Prairieland Exhibition Hall so we could beat the rush of other exhibitors who would all be trying to get in through the single truck door that entered the Hall. For the 1st time ever Will decided to have all his equipment trucked in and our show skids were delivered by a 53ft trailer rather than try to trailer it all from Red Deer. This was a great decision as everything went quite smoothly (at least on the move in) and we were all set up by early in the afternoon.

On Saturday morning we all headed back to the Exhibition Hall in time for the 96th Highlanders Bag Pipe and Drum band to open the show. While it took some time for the rental stores to make it to the back of the hall where we were exhibiting, within the first hour we started to have attendees stop by. Keith Andrews, the President of CRA Saskatchewan and Prairieland Rental Centre in Regina stopped by and was pleased to hear we were giving away a Black Folding Bar Height Chair to all attendees that met with us at the show. At last year`s show we gave out one of our very popular Tall Folding Cocktail Tables so this was a great way for the customers to get exposed to some of our more popular plastic folding tables and chairs. As we went through the day I could tell those that did get a free Tall Folding Cocktail Table last year, definitely remembered us.

As in prior years, Brian from Handy Special Events stopped by to check out our product display. He was particularly impressed with the look and feel of our new Serenity line of Crystal Wine Glasses and our always popular Resin Chiavari Chairs which feature a steel core for enhanced durability and strength. He also spent a fair bit of time examining our new improved plywood folding tables. Our new wood folding tables feature 13 layers of plywood, Canadian hardwood for the underside rails, bolts through table top construction and 1.2mm thick steel tubing for leg frame structure all providing a durable and strong wood folding table. I could see Brian was giving our wood folding tables a serious look over.

This was our 3rd year of exhibiting at the Prairie show and each time we meet with more new Customers from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. I find it amazing how far our Prairie friends are willing to drive to support the event and attend the evening dinner and festivities. The show finished at 4pm which gave us a very short amount of time to get packed up and ready for the evening dinner and entertainment. It's always great to get together with our old and new friends and relax with a nice glass of wine and a hearty roast beef supper!

Jeff Campbell the CRA National President (and President of St. Thomas Rent-All) was on hand to take part in the festivities as well as update everyone on what the CRA National organization is working on for the benefit of members and associate members. One of the programs that Jeff announced was the ability for Members and Associate Members to have a professional PR firm (High Impact Public Relations) help publish a newsworthy subject to the marketplace. High Impact PR was instrumental in getting the message out to the community of St. Thomas, Ontario for Jeff`s step up to become the President of Canadian Rental Association. Jeff is now a celebrity in the community and he has seen a rise in the number of visits to his store which is definitely a plus for his winter business.

The National Event Supply Trade Show Team is gearing up for our only local show of the season, the CRFA Show at the Direct Energy Centre in Toronto. The CRFA Show is a great opportunity for restaurants, caterers, and others within the foodservice industry to take a look at our porcelain dinnerware, our stainless steel cutlery, our crystal and glass stemware, and our many great service pieces. It's also a great time to do a little comparison shopping and understand why our customers are thrilled with our pricing on our fantastic line-up of products. While the team will be spending the majority of their time helping visitors to our booth (1911), they've put together a list of three things that they're excited to see while at the show. Here they are in no particular order!

The first thing that the team is excited to see is the competition at the Flair Festival Stage. If you've ever seen the movie Cocktail with Tom Cruise, then you have an idea what flair bartending is. If not, check out the video below to see one of the competitors in the World Flair Bartending Championships. In addition to the World Flair Bartending Championships, there's flair tandem shows and the TFL Pro Championship which features the best Flair bartenders in Canada. For more information, check out this schedule!

The second thing that the trade show team is excited to see is a booth for a company from Georgia called High Road Craft Ice Cream and Sorbet. We're all big fans of ice cream at National Event Supply, and we're interested in seeing what they have to offer. From the looks of their website, they've got some interesting flavours going on. Personally, I'm hoping they have Red Berries and Prosecco Sorbet to try, but when it comes to ice cream, anything is good. High Road Craft Ice Cream and Sorbet will be exhibiting in booth 817.

The third booth that we're interested in checking out is a little cheesy—but who doesn't love cheese?!? The Springbank Cheese Company has retail locations in Alberta and Ontario and also sell their high-quality cheeses over the internet. Through these channels they sell over 700 different kinds of cheese in sizes ranging from 20 grams to 35 kilograms. While I'm more of a Havarti and Mild Cheddar man, they've got all the cheeses that the cool kids crave like gorgonzola and roquefort. The Springbank Cheese Company will be exhibiting in booth 905.