Usually you only see restaurants and organizations with commercial kitchens competing in the Downtown Ithaca Chili Cook-Off. This year was a bit different when a group of friends with no culinary association created the team, Chili McChiliface, and overcame barriers with unique collaborations to bring the vibes and win the People’s Choice chili!
It all started on a cold January evening when my friends and I were having our usual meetup to drink beers at a local brewery and shoot the breeze. Somehow the annual chili cook off came up in conversation and one of us, I think it was Steve, said, “we should try competing!”
After mulling it over, Steve, Nicholas, Chris and myself got together one evening to chat about seriously entering and participating in the event. To avoid any peer pressure influence, Steve’s wife, Allison, had us all close our eyes and asked us to raise our hands if we were serious about doing the chili cook off. That way if anyone didn’t raise their hand, it would be anonymous and we wouldn’t move forward.
We all raised our hands. It was official. Chili Cook-Off here we come.
The rules of entry were pretty strict so we had to figure out how to make it work.
First of all, contestants couldn’t make the chili in a residential kitchen. The chili had to be made in a commercial kitchen that was covered by insurance and regulated by the proper safety laws. This makes a lot of sense. You don’t want folks getting sick at the biggest fundraising event for the Downtown Ithaca Alliance.
Steve was the only one of us who had experience working in a commercial kitchen where he specialized in high-quantity grilled cheese and tomato soup orders during his time at a retirement resort but that was in a different state so we were going to need to collaborate with someone with a commercial kitchen.
I first went to someone I usually go to with questions of all sorts, Aly Evans, the Executive Director of Foodnet Meals on Wheels. I asked her if we could possibly use their kitchen on the weekend but they are located up in the hill near the mall on Triphammer Road and there were concerns about how we would get all that chili down the hill and keep it hot enough to stay safe for consumption.
Her advice to me was to find a restaurant on the Commons where the event was taking place that wouldn’t be competing and ask them if we could use their kitchen.
So I walked into some places where I knew the folks and asked if they would be competing until I came to Lev. They said they wouldn’t be competing this year.
That’s when I emailed one of the owners, Yen, who is my fellow board member at the Tompkins Chamber of Commerce.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Yen and her husband / Lev co-owner, Ben, were on vacation. The final day to enter the cook off was February 9th and I heard nothing back so I figured our chances of competing this year had vanished.
Yen emailed me back when they returned on February 10th, said they’d been away and that we could use their kitchen for the Chili Cook-Off!
It was an exciting development but I was worried it might be too late.
I called the Downtown Ithaca Alliance immediately and they thankfully told me they extended the Chili Cook-Off entry date to February 12th.
We decided on the name Chili McChiliface as a play on the Boaty McBoatface story from a few years ago. We made sure all the insurance requirements were met and officially entered the 27th Annual Downtown Ithaca Chili Cook-Off.
It was real.
Steve immediately bought some ingredients and we got together to try out some recipes. He told us that while he was shopping, he had a gut feeling while walking past some off brand Coca-Cola that it might be a good addition.
He made a pork chili and a traditional spicy beef chili. Then he started up a small saucer pan to mix some of the beef chili with the cola. While some of us (me) were a little disgusted by the idea, when tasted, it actually had a lot of potential.
Nicholas mixed the cola beef chili with the pork chili and the flavors were all of a sudden coming together. We all agreed, with the short time frame we had, the beef, pork, cola mixture would be the direction for our chili.
It was going to take a lot of ingredients to participate in the Chili Cook-Off since we would be required to make 30 gallons for the event!
That’s quite an investment so to offset the costs we went looking for sponsors.
Chris Roscoe of Bailey Place Insurance stepped up and we had enough to get dozens of canned beans, canned tomatoes, onions, seven bottles of off brand Coca-Cola and so much more to make the 30 gallons of chili required.
We are so grateful to Bailey Place Insurance! Visit their website and see how they can help you with your insurance needs.
Nicholas, Steve, Chris and I cooked up another test batch of the chili and we settled on the final recipe… only now we had to figure out how to make 30 gallons of it. Chris is an engineer so he was vital in helping figure out the proportions and we headed out to Aldi’s and BJ’s to get all the ingredients except for the meat which we’d get closer to the event.
We had agreed on all getting matching Chili McChiliface hoodies and Nicholas designed our logo to feature a chili pot with the shark face from Warhawk fighter jets and it worked perfectly!
The only thing left to acquire was the meat. Steve visited Cudlin’s Meat Market in Newfield to pick up a regular order and got to chatting with them about how we were going to be competing in the Chili Cook-Off and if they’d like to sponsor us by providing the meat. They said yes!
So we got the beef but they only could give us half of the pork we needed but offered up some chorizo. How could we say no??
Huge thanks to Cudlin’s Meat Market out in Newfield for their support. Follow them on Facebook and visit them to get some great meat!
Leading up to the Cook-Off, we all had some fun doing fake press conferences and creating content to promote the fact that we were going to be competing.
They were a lot of fun and you can see them all on my Instagram.
We still couldn’t believe it was actually happening but come 6:00 AM on Saturday March 1st, the day of the cook off, things got real quick.
Ben at Lev Kitchen let us into the kitchen before the sun was up and we got to cooking the 30 gallons required for the event. We worked like a well oiled machine for four guys who had never done anything like this before. Steve and Chris were at the stove and Nicholas and I were opening cans in the order that they needed to be added to the pot.
Occasionally, Nicholas would strain the liquid from the black beans and white beans so our chili wouldn’t get too liquidy but we had the 30 gallons pretty much cooked up and complete before Lev needed to open for business. Which kind of surprised us all.
Lev was kind enough to let us use two burners on their stove during the Chili Cook-Off but we needed to keep our chili warm outside during the event so Chris brought his propane burners for our little booth outside Lev in the Commons. We needed a permit from the Ithaca Fire Department to burn propane in the Commons but it was pretty easy to obtain the week before.
By 10:30 AM, our chili was staying hot, our booth was set up and we were just hanging out watching the other competitors set up. Nicholas single-handedly chopped up 20 bags of green onions. Everything was rolling smoothly!
Then we turned our music up on the sound system we brought and at noon the event began!
I was taking tickets and hyping folks up to try our chili, Steve and Nicholas were pouring the chili and topping it with green onions and Chris was the runner, going back and forth from the burners outside to the burners inside making sure everything stayed at 150 degrees so it was safe to serve.
Chris was a beast during the event. A few times the outside burners went out due to the wind but he started them right back up and we had no loss in temperature. He also would refill our outside pots by moving our reserve chili from inside Lev to our booth outside.
All while I was trying to keep the energy high at the Chili McChiliface booth. When VIPs came up, we’d all shout “VIP, VIP, VIP.”
When folks with mugs came up, we’d all shout, “we got mugged!”
I would also regularly repeat, “Try the Chili McChiliface chili. We used beef and pork from Cudlin’s Meat Market in Newfield. It’s got a little bit of sweet, a little bit of heat and it’s well balanced for all palates.”
Not a single judge took us up on bribe offers?
It was so much fun to see people come through and have a good time and it’s still amazing to think about how good of a team we were.
Approximately 1000 servings!
We served our chili so efficiently and by 2:40 PM, we ran out.
Thirty gallons of chili gone in just over two and a half hours. We were proud we’d made it more than halfway through the event which seemed pretty reasonable because Simeon's was set up right next to us and they ran out of their chili a few minutes after us.
It seemed like we made a good impression and we were proud to accomplish our goal of competing in the Chili Cook-Off as a group of random bozos.
We didn’t think we would win anything but as the weekend wore on, I was becoming more and more curious and impatient. We weren’t going to be disappointed if we didn’t win but, gawd darnit, I just wanted to know!
On Monday, the Downtown Ithaca Alliance had posted the winners the judges chose and Chili McChiliface was nowhere to be found. In fact, it appeared as though the winners were awarded their medals at the event.
“Oh well,” I thought. It was an awesome experience nonetheless.
Then my phone rang.
It was Adam from the Downtown Ithaca Alliance. He said he’d been counting up the votes of event attendees all morning and Chili McChiliface won the People’s Choice chili!
The only thing I could think of was how surreal it was for a team of first timers, who named themselves Chili McChiliface to be voted the People’s Choice chili for the 27th annual Downtown Ithaca Chili Cook-Off.
We went into the Downtown Ithaca Alliance office and they gave us a trophy, took our picture and interviewed us for the radio.
What a crazy experience. Thanks so much to everyone who had fun at our booth and enjoyed our chili enough to vote for it. Steve, Nicholas, Chris and I went into this thing just wanting to have fun and we had a lot of fun. We’re so glad you had fun too.
We’re still trying to figure out if we want to do it again or compete in other cook-offs. Maybe we will but we went into this just for the adventure with no expectations of what comes after. We were just living in the moment.
You may see Chili McChiliface again…
In the meantime, grab a People’s Choice Chili McChiliface t-shirt!