What comes to mind when you think of Victoria, BC? If you said poutine, you may have been one of the lucky people who caught the poutine competition on May 13th. A serious, but friendly, battle took place between two hotel giants in Victoria: The Fairmont Empress Hotel and Inn at Laurel Point.
The location: the grand front lawn of The Empress Hotel. The prize: the Golden Curd and bragging rights!

For those who aren’t familiar with poutine, it’s a heart-stopping dish that originated in Quebec which involves three ingredients… fries, chicken gravy, and cheese curds. The fries should be crunchy on the outside, but soft on the inside and the cheese curds should be fresh and squeak when you bite into them. Lastly, the gravy should be poured onto the dish right before serving to prevent the fries from being soggy. That would be the purist version, but the dish has been enjoying a sort of explosion of interest in the past couple of years and you can now find upscale restaurants putting their own take on it with non-traditional premium ingredients such as lobster, foie gras, and truffles.

The Empress Hotel’s entry for the competition was Tiger Poutine, which was topped with their signature butter chicken/curry.

The Inn at Laurel Point came back at them with their Duck Poutine, topping their version with crispy duck confit.

In all honesty, both poutines were incredibly good, I finished both servings clean to the last fry, sauce and all. Judging for best poutine was based on five criteria including the all-important cheese stretch and grease load! There was quite the debate on whether a high grease load should be rated good or bad. We’ll leave that up to personal preference to decide! I won’t get into too much detail of who had the better poutine, but the general consensus was that Team Laurel Point had superior fries while Team Empress won significantly more points in the cheese stretch category.

In the end, the Golden Curd trophy went to… Chef Ito and Team Empress!!

It was a super tight race, with Team Empress coming in just ahead of Team Laurel Point. They were gracious in their defeat and egged on by Downtown Victoria Business Association Manager, Ken Kelly, declared to all present that “Our poutine is definitely not as good as your poutine!”

It was a beautiful afternoon in the Victoria causeway and it was great to meet all the other twitter judges who came out to revel in poutine goodness @lacouvee @toots11 @seedtocup @FlygirlWS @cqwww . We also got to meet Auntie Vie, great aunt to Pamela Anderson. She was so sweet to talk to and looked very refined with her lovely red hat.

Both teams made enough poutine that day to feed the crowds of people who stopped to join in on the fun. If you missed it, not to worry because both poutines are available at their respective hotels. The Empress Hotel’s Tiger Poutine can be found at The Bengal Lounge and Laurel Point’s Duck Poutine is on the menu at their restaurant, Aura. I definitely encourage you to taste both of them and let us know if you do!

Thanks to Fairmont Empress for letting YouCook use some pictures of the event that we didn’t manage to catch ourselves!