Mac-n-Cheese Bowl returns to Cohoes Saturday as street fest
COHOES — Before the Mac-n-Cheese Bowl ended last March during its first time as an outdoor festival on Remsen Street, city officials and representatives of the event’s beneficiary and organizer, the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, had already decided they wanted it to return for 2023.
And so it came to pass: The 13th timesunion.com/Table Hopping Mac-n-Cheese Bowl will be held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, March 25, on five blocks of Remsen Street. There will be at least 25 tasting stations from area restaurants and other providers as well as beer samples from a dozen Capital Region breweries. Adult tickets cost $35 ($55 with beer) and include samples from all participating stations; admission for kids ages 5 to 12 is $10, with tickets for 10 samples. Tickets may be purchased online at regionalfoodbank.net. If not sold out in advance, tickets will also be available on Saturday at the food bank’s table, set up in front of 95 Remsen, on the corner of Remsen and Ontario streets.
From the city’s perspective, the Mac-n-Cheese Bowl, with an estimated attendance of 4,000 last year despite chilly temperatures and occasional afternoon drizzle, introduced many new people to downtown’s offerings, said Mayor Bill Keeler. To the food bank, for which the event is one of four major fundraisers it holds annually, it was an opportunity to come back from two pandemic-affected years with an outdoor setting that allowed for social distancing and, importantly, to increase revenue.
The Mac-n-Cheese Bowl was launched in 2010 at the suggestion a reader of the Table Hopping blog, which since the beginning has been a title sponsor of the event, along with timesunion.com. It was held for its first few years in banquet rooms before moving, from 2014 to 2019, to an athletic facility at Siena College in Loudonville. (It was canceled days prior to being held in 2020 because of the onset of the pandemic and held in a takeout format in 2021.) While the Siena…
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