Vancouver’s multicoloured City Centre Artist Lodge was awash with green Saturday afternoon as crowds swarmed the Main Street location in celebration of an unlikely culinary delight – the pickle. Vancouver held its first Picklefest with a daylong event that hosted live music, games, a home pickling competition, and vendors serving all manner of weird and wonderful dill offerings. Guests donning pickle costumes and pickle-emblazoned t-shirts, often with their pickle-dressed pets in tow, perused the vendors selling everything from infused beers and sodas to specially curated ice creams, popcorn, and pizzas. Adin Wener, founder of PickleFest Canada, first came up with the idea for the festival almost 10 years ago after stumbling across a pickle festival in New York while on a trip to the city for his 40th birthday. “I turned to my wife and I said ‘Everybody here is smiling, and happy, and I have to take that to Toronto and recreate it,’” he said. After a slight halt in plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wener eventually launched the festival in Toronto three years ago, and the crowds found the event more than worth the wait. “It blew up,” he says. As born and raised Vancouverites, Wener says he and his wife hoped crowds in B.C. would have the same response once they brought the festival to their hometown. The event sold out a few days before it was expected to open. “It’s amazing, it’s beyond my wildest dreams of how happy everyone is,” he said. “It’s a huge party, this is what Picklefest is about.” While 2,000 tickets sold out before the event, Wener says the number of attendees would have totaled closer to 3,000, given that people lining the block were ushered in as earlier, ticketholders left. Wener suspects the event drew such success primarily because pickles are “easy to eat, and you don’t get full,” meaning perusing the multiple stands and dabbling in every offering is easy work for foodies. There is also a nostalgic, universal element to both preserving and eating preserved goods, he said. “Pickles are generational. Canada is a country of immigrants, and (everyone), whether you are Korean or Jewish, Polish or Russian, has a story about fermentation and pickles being made by their grandparents, or great grandparents, and it ties into the DNA of this wonderful country,” he said. “Everybody has a pickle story. Everybody knows someone who made pickles as a way of survival.” While the list of vendors and obscure pickle offerings might grow as the festival expands, Wener can say for certain that there will be one food festival usual suspect that will never make the cut, at least as long as he is at its helm. Never will guests see a pickle-eating competition, he says, because the competition can never seem to end “without somebody being sick.”
