May the fork be with you
Celebrate Star Wars Day by eating themed treats
It’s eat or be eaten in Star Wars.
Carnivorous monsters such as the sarlacc wait to be fed. A star destroyer consumes smaller spaceships with its tractor beam. An exogorth, or giant space slug, tries to swallow the Millennium Falcon.
“There certainly are moments of things being consumed, but the heroes don’t have time for eating. They kinda blast off,” says actor Charles Ross.
Ross would know. His George Lucas-approved One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, which just ended its Toronto run, compresses the three original movies into 60 minutes. Dining scenes take up “less than 1 per cent,” he says.
Yes, Luke drinks blue bantha milk in A New Hope and Rey munches on bleak rations in The Force Awakens. There’s even the time in The Empire Strikes Back when Lando Calrissian throws a dinner party, but Darth Vader shows up and ruins it.
Still, fans must eat. On May the 4th, a.k.a. Star Wars Day because it sounds like the Jedi benediction “May the Force be with you,” there are parties to make the Mos Eisley cantina look sleepy.
The Hard Rock Café on Yonge St. is headquarters for the annual Star Wars Day Toronto costume parade.
On the menu are regular dishes rechristened thematically, such as Jawa Food (poutine) and the Bespin Brownie, named for the gas planet around which Cloud City orbits.
“It just seemed like something that would have been available in Cloud City . . . like not in the regular cafeteria, I’m picturing the one from the nice restaurant that Lando takes his dates to,” organizer Sean Ward says.
About 500 people are said to be going to the event. Entry is a minimum $10 donation at the door.
Other restaurants will pay tribute. Osaka sushi chef Okitsugu Kado has been carving Star Wars models out of yams for more than 10 years, including last year’s BB8.
Pittsburgh’s Root 174 is putting on its third annual May the 4th dinner, a $100 meal at which guests wear Princess Leia buns and dine on chef Keith Fuller’s Gamorrean cracklings with carbonite womp rat hearts. (In English: pork rinds with foie gras dust and freeze-dried raspberries.)
“We poke fun at the movies as well,” says general manager Austin Smith, referring to the Jar Jar Binks tongue terrine once served. apataki@thestar.ca, Twitter @amypataki