Tickets sell out fast for this big food event
“I call it the Poutine Super Bowl,” Tim Beaulieu said, “especially in New Hampshire. This is where it all started.” Beaulieu is the founder and organizer of New Hampshire’s PoutineFest, an annual celebration of everything poutine. Poutine, a French Canadian dish made from french fries, gravy and cheese curds, is a staple of New Hampshire’s Franco-American community. “It was my grandfather who inspired me to get involved in [Franco-American] culture, and after seeing what they did with poutine in Montreal I realized, ‘Oh, my god, we have to do that here.”
“So we took some of those pieces from Montreal up in Quebec,” Beaulieu said, “and made them a little bit more New England-y. Essentially, [PoutineFest] is a big poutine sampling event that is family-friendly. We have entertainment. But mostly we have local restaurants, pretty much all from New Hampshire, to see how their poutine compares to each other. We have a couple that come up from Mass and a couple that come over from Maine, but the New Hampshire event is primarily New Hampshire-based. We do have sister events in other states now … in Vermont, Maine, and this year for the first time the city of Boston. So we’re calling this event the Granite State PoutineFest now, and it’s kind of the flagship of all of them.”
For many years, Beaulieu said, PoutineFest was held at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Merrimack, but since the brewery’s closing last year the festival has changed its location and its schedule.
“So Aug. 29 is when it’s going to be this year,” he said. “We used to do it in October for probably four or five years after Covid, but when Anheuser-Busch closed we did a bit of a scramble to find a good, suitable location. And most of them had late summer offerings, so we moved it to August. We’re going to be at 603 Brewery. The thing I like about them is that they’re so close to the town of Londonderry and they have experience doing events and they’ve kind of seen what we’ve done in the past. There will be slightly different beer offerings, which is great, because that works for me. But it will still be family-friendly, which I like. And it’s something that we both share as values.”
Beaulieu sees PoutineFest as an opportunity for independent restaurants to showcase their interpretations of poutine as they compete, whether they present traditional takes on it or more interpretive ones.
“We have a people’s choice award,” he said, “and we also have an overall champion from our chef judges. So we get a little bit of both. We create custom kitchens for all the restaurants outside. The hardest part [of coming here] is most of these poutine vendors are small businesses that don’t have the infrastructure to leave their restaurants. We give them as much product and infrastructure as we possibly can, so they can’t say no, unless they have a scheduling conflict. We also pay them to come; they’re getting paid to do this. It’s not a ton of money, but we’re making sure we cover as many of their expenses as possible.”
The tricky part of attending PoutineFest is getting tickets.
“They are gone in hours,” Beaulieu said. “Everyone remembers our first year back from Covid when we sold out in one hour. It was nuts. But since that time it’s usually a few hours. Our poutiniacs, they set their alarm for 10 o ‘clock on the day of ticket sales. If you’re there at 10, you’ll get tickets. If you wait till the afternoon, there’s no guarantee.”
Granite State PoutineFest
When: Saturday, Aug. 29
Where: 603 Brewery, 42 Main St., Londonderry, 404-6123, 603brewery.com
Tickets: Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 16, at poutinefest.com/newhampshire and will sell out quickly. General admission tickets are $54.99.
Featured photo: PoutineFest. Courtesy photo.
