The PNE Fair at the Pacific National Exhibition is back, and so is all the delicious food, from gourmet hot dogs to fancy ice creams and exotic ethnic treats!
The same as every year, on the menu in 2023 there are mini donuts, deep-fried desserts, foot-long hot dogs and other tasty items! Some of the new food truck-style cuisine we’ve tried this year includes Lickity Drippity ice creams, Japanese nori tacos, birria grilled cheese sandwiches, duck pizza and more! We also got to try a delicious dessert made by celebrity chef Ned Bell at the Safeway Cooking Stage.
To learn more about the PNE in general, see our article about the PNE or visit the attraction’s official website at pne.ca. To learn about this year’s food vendors, and what they have looked like in previous years, see below.
Food Vendors at the PNE in 2023
The Pacific National Exhibition at the end of the summer wouldn’t be the PNE Fair without its food vendors. In 2023 there are over 50 food stalls on site!
Some of the Fair’s traditional favourites you can expect to see include the Super Foot Long Hot Dogs, the Little Donut Bakery and Hunky Bills Perogies. Other regulars you’ll see are Twisted Potato and Steve O’s Sweets & Treats. This year there are also lots of other food trucks to check out, such as Taco Nori, Mom’s Grilled Cheese Truck, Little Devils Wood Fire Pizza, and many more.
For tickets and full details about the PNE Fair, see the PNE.ca website.
2023 Foods We’ve Tested and Can Recommend
Just a few of the treats we’ve tried from PNE food vendors this year include the following:
- A jam and bacon bread from Mo-Bacon. It was delicious!
- Duck meat pizza from Little Devils Wood Fire Pizza (where they have a real fire oven in their truck).
- A Coaster Dog hot dog from Diggity Dogs (to commemorate the Wooden Roller Coaster’s 65th anniversary). At the same venue we also got to try some of Parallel 49’s Coaster Crush Beer. The beer is a hazy pale ale and really good!
- A meat and cheese sandwich from Mom’s Grilled Cheese Truck (where the beef was slow roasted birria-style). Yum!
- A salmon taco from Taco Nori (where instead of a hard corn tortilla it came in a deep-fried nori seaweed shell). It was like eating a giant piece of sushi that looked like a Mexican taco! What a clever concept!
- An ice cream and cotton candy dessert from Lickity Drippity (which we think might end up being the PNE’s #1 top hit for kids this year).
The above are just a small number of the many tasty and exotic food truck and festival-style foods you’ll find at the PNE Fair this year.
For the full list of participating food vendors in 2023, see the pne.ca website. To see us in action testing out the above listed foods, check out the following video*.
Further below in this article you’ll find videos of featured foods from past PNE years. As you’ll see in one of the videos, in 2018 they were selling cricket-covered caramel apples! There are lots of exotic food items in 2023, but nothing with crickets.
For tickets and full details about the PNE Fair, see the PNE.ca website.
PNE Food Vendors from Past Years
Each year the PNE offers members of the media a tour of the Fair’s food vendor lineup. In 2020 the PNE had its annual food tour for the media and we got to try Godzilla macaroni from Reel Mac & Cheese, corn dog samples from the Corn Dog King and perogies from Hunky Bill’s.
We also got to try some delicious noodles from Salt Spring Noodle Bar, a gourmet hot dog from Foot Long Hot Dogs, a deep-fried Kit Kat, and a donut chicken burger from Steve O’s. There was also poutine, twisted potatoes, mini donuts, and pineapple whip ice cream from Summerland Soft Serve.
All the food was delicious! So glad we went on an empty stomach!
Check out the following video from 2020. As you’ll see, even though the festival happened on a smaller scale than usual, there was still a wide selection of tasty offerings that year.
PNE Foods from 2018
In 2018 we headed to the PNE Fair early in the morning, before the place opened to the public, and sampled some of the latest and craziest food items at the fair. Below is a video about the media food tour we got to go on that year. Speaking in the video is Laura Balance, a spokesperson for the PNE.
Below is a video of Brian Jones from the B&B Diner describing his milkshake burgers to members of the media during a food tour at the PNE in 2018. Among other toppings, the burger included a scoop of garlic-flavoured ice cream. It was, surprisingly, very good!
There are always new exotic foods at the PNE and 2018 was no exception. Next Gen Concessions offered something sweet, sustainable, sticky and with a crunch! It was their cricket caramel apple that everyone was talking about!
The following video features a talk about the PNE’s cricket caramel apples during a presentation to media in August of 2018.
Other Information
For full details about the Fair, see the official Pacific National Exhibition website.
For more information about the PNE, see our article about the Pacific National Exhibition.
To learn more about the Pacific National Exhibition, check out the following articles:
Other articles that might be of interest include the following:
- Vancouver’s August Calendar of Events
- Vancouver’s September Calendar of Events
- Labour Day Long Weekend in Vancouver
- Lower Mainland Activities for Children
* The music in the food video from 2023 is by LiteSaturation from Pixabay.
