Battle 4 of The Got to Be NC Competition Dining Series, highlighting the best of the state’s food, agriculture and culinary talent, kicked off last night in Raleigh and SobeSavvy.com was there for a fabulous, foodie fun night out! 
The event was held in downtown Raleigh’s City Market in the building that is now 214 Martin Street. It is a very unique event space that also serves as a Pop Up Restaurant for hire! Each table was beautifully decorated with candles and red and black linens from Alsco. Cocktails, wine and beer were available for purchase thruout the evening. Servers started us off with warm bread and butter. But not just any bread..we enjoyed artisanal breads from La Farm Bakery. The white chocolate baguette was a favorite at the table and we all tried hard not to fill up on that before the courses started! 

This was my first dinner battle and as a fan of such food shows like IronChef and Chopped , I was very excited to be able to partake and ‘be the judge’ last night. Host/Director of Competition Dining, Jimmy Crippen explained to guests that we will get to to enjoy and vote on six courses without knowing which of the two teams of three Chefs created them. We were all able to cast our votes by submitting our ballots via smartphone. The whole process of voting was very cool and high tech! This was unlike any other dinner experience I have ever had!
Last night’s preliminary round was a “Ham & Jam” battle between Team Scratch Mavericks and Orange Crush and featured 2 secret ingredients: Goodnight Brothers Country Ham Thin Sliced Dry-Cured Ham and Norm’s Farms Elderberry Jams & Extracts. I did a screenshot from my phone of these ballot photos (photo credit dining staff/Heidi Bilotto/Competition Dining) of each course that we were served as follows: 

The winners Team Scratch Mavericks from The Hen & The Hog and SoCo Farm and Food made quite an impression with their veal entree that I decided to do a how to clean your plate video clip as shown here: 

Chefs Chelsea Houge, Jessica Collier Ricks and Jeremy Law move on to the Thursday night semi final against the winner of tonights preliminary battle. Cheers to to chefs Rich Carter, Sara Samuels and Anthony Calcagna from Team Orange Crush from Catering Works for their delicious part in making last night so wonderful! We even got a parting gift of ham that I plan on wrapping around some asparagus tips and broiling!  Here is my photo slideshow recap of the delicious fun that was had! 

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