A Rhythm N’ Spice Hot Sauce Festival is coming to Cambridge’s Foundry building in May with a goal of highlighting women and Bipoc vendors.
The festival, on Saturday, will include hot sauces for sample and purchase and local food vendors serving spicy wings, tacos and Caribbean food, with cocktails and other beverages available for purchase. There will be spicy challenges and prizes, cooking demos, live entertainment and dance lessons, and activities for kids including face painting and steel pan lessons by the Cambridge Youth Steel Orchestra & Tempo International, organizer Nicola Williams said.
Cambridge is no stranger to spice. For years, East Coast Grill, a seafood and barbecue restaurant in Inman Square, famously held “Hell Nights” with chefs serving ridiculously spicy food to fanatics, pushing the envelope of what it means to be able to handle your heat. (It was so popular it had a two-night revival in Needham in 2019 after the original restaurant closed.) Maybe with this reputation in mind, a Sichuan restaurant called Too Hot is expected to open in Harvard Square in October.
Williams enjoys the heat too.
“Spice is part of my Jamaican culture,” she said. “I grow Scotch bonnet peppers every year to share with my four siblings because they love it as much as I do. During the winter holidays I make a variety of hot sauces using local peppers harvested from my garden and other friends’ gardens.”
Challenges get “off-the-chain hot”
Used to make jerk, Scotch bonnet peppers have a heat rating of 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville units — similar to the spice level of a habanero and about 40 times hotter than a jalapeño. At the Rhythm N’ Spice Hot Sauce Festival, Williams said, the spicy challenges will have “hot sauces that are off-the-chain hot,” with some reaching up to 6 million on the Scoville scale. That’s not for the faint of heart.
Although Williams is a spice lover, and, she noted, a fan of the YouTube show phenomenon “Hot Ones” – in which celebrities eat chicken wings covered in increasingly spicy hot sauces while being interviewed – Rhythm N’ Spice will have something for everyone, non-spice lovers included.
“We’ll have lots of options, including Mexican, Jamaican and American barbecue, and we even have small batch ice cream,” Williams said, good for cooling off from whatever spice level you choose.
From JerkFest to Rhythm N’ Spice
The idea for the festival came as part of her Williams Agency’s work producing the Boston JerkFest – in its 11th year this July.
“I always added a hot sauce component there, but I wanted to see if it could stand on its own and if we could have a stand-alone event in the future,” Williams said.
Williams and her marketing and event-planning firm, which focuses on sustainable food, small businesses, culture and the arts, collaborated with Whitehouse Station Sauce to put on a Boston Hot Sauce Festival last April at Garage B at The Speedway. The two-day celebration included 20 hot sauce purveyors, hot sauce challenges, food, drinks and entertainment. A portion of the proceeds went to Sustainable Food & Culture, a nonprofit in Harvard Square that is additionally supported by Boston JerkFest and Boston Local Food Festival, which Williams also co-founded.
This year, Williams said, Whitehouse Station Sauce is doing its own event at a brewery, but she wanted to do another event to support Sustainable Food & Culture and decided it was finally time to start her hot sauce festival. It will be held at The Foundry, 101 Rogers St., in East Cambridge near Kendall Square.
“We thought The Foundry was an ideal space because there’s a kitchen there, so we can do demos, there’s places for dance, there’s indoor and outdoor space,” Williams said.
Global flavors
As a veteran of these events, Williams has long struggled with seeing fewer women and people of color as vendors at food festivals, and hopes Rhythm N’ Spice will help remedy that by highlighting those businesses.
“That’s why this is a festival of global flavors, because I really wanted to center the diversity that we have in spice,” Williams said. “I’m Jamaican, so it’s part of my DNA, and I really wanted to amplify more women and more people of color.”
The day includes two sessions, noon to 4 p.m. and 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tickets are available for buy online for $15, with kids under 12 able to attend for free. VIP tickets are available for $45 and include a meal ticket, a complimentary drink, access to the Tasting Room where a variety of drinks will be available, and a gift bag.
“We’re building on the culture that we have in our community, and I’m really excited and really proud to present this festival,” Williams said.
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Not to be confused with Rhythm ‘N Wraps restaurant (and former Harvard Science Center/MIT area food truck) offering delicious vegan food near BU in Boston.