This weekend, food mongers, wine-sellers and top- restaurateurs set up shop in London’s Regents Park for the annual Taste of London Festival. Being promised ‘the gourmet day of my life’, I meandered on over, empty-stomached, and keen to find out what A Taste of London could offer over the city’s other extensive food outlets.
When you can find a wealth of organic treats at Borough Market, equip yourself with more spices than a merchant down Brick Lane, not to mention the huge variety of cafés, markets and independent food shops and world renowned restaurants in London, what could possibly be the benefit of paying for a ticket to an event offering just that?
It would seem, not a lot. While the festival features more Michelin starred restaurants than you could shake a stick at, it was hard to work out why if you can afford to buy a ticket the event, and then pay £5 for a Mr Kipling sized pie from Bumpkin, you wouldn’t just go to the actual restaurant and experience the food properly; using real, not paper plates!
The festival does of course boast a selection of live ‘celebrity chef’ cooking events and interactive food workshops, of which, the cheese and wine pairing event, hosted by Galbani Dolcelatte, was a lot of fun, but these were just not enough to justify the ticket price. The cheese was delicious, don’t get me wrong, but you can buy it in Tesco, without the affliction of the hoards of upper-middle-class ‘foodies’ (translation: yummy-mummy types without children), that flock to the event in their LK Bennett shod droves.
Ultimately, if you want good food, go to Borough Market, one of London’s many great restaurants, or failing that, go to Waitrose, where you would find much the same as what you will at this festival. If you want to pose near a pop-up patisserie and plumily declare that the slow roasted pork-belly you just snaffled from a designer BBQ is ‘to die for’, look out for next year’s A Taste of London.
