Taste of London Festival.June 2008
To Regent’s park to the taste of London festival. With the help of the ever popular BLBW I snuck in.
Midsummer’s eve wasn’t marvellous weather, the brooding grey skies not raising our spirits much. The festival is a large tented village, a sort of Glastonbury food market come posh country show.
The punters are a mixed bunch; the bars of Bromley and St Albans but also Notting Hill and Fulham will have been empty. The air was thick with aftershave and loud scent. The style ran the whole spectrum from “Gap-py” casual to formal suits and pashminas to high street leery shirt and hair gel arm in arm with tiny mini dresses, too much gold and cleavage matched with gravy browning legs and porn heels. Inside posher types abound, I counted 3 pairs of almost canary yellow cords matched with Tattersall shirts (the sure sign of the very posh) accompanied by their equine partners in slightly toned down version of the “Bromley” girls' garb.
The worst dressed person? Other than your humble scribe a girl all in black other than a pair of stripy yellow blue and white wellies. I’m sorry I don’t care if Kate and Alexa rock them wellies are wellies.
So what was tasty?
And why the f*ck would you want rice bran oil?
M
adeleine moment.
“She passed me one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the beer in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the cool liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory and I was back in that cramped “off-license” in old Streatham, the air thick with the smell of turmeric and damp, the shelves groaning with grim cellophane wrapped porn, the wheezing fridge packed with chilly cans of Stella and my mouth ,my mouth was full of the dry boring crumbs of those strangely indestructible everlasting German cakes that corner shops always stock but no one buys twice”
Tv Chefery
while waiting for BLBW to knock off I sat through a couple of cooking demo’s one from Thomisina do dah, the other from Shaun Hill a foodie hero who seemed a little bemused by the whole affair, you felt he was little to old for all this stuff.
Midsummer’s eve wasn’t marvellous weather, the brooding grey skies not raising our spirits much. The festival is a large tented village, a sort of Glastonbury food market come posh country show.
The punters are a mixed bunch; the bars of Bromley and St Albans but also Notting Hill and Fulham will have been empty. The air was thick with aftershave and loud scent. The style ran the whole spectrum from “Gap-py” casual to formal suits and pashminas to high street leery shirt and hair gel arm in arm with tiny mini dresses, too much gold and cleavage matched with gravy browning legs and porn heels. Inside posher types abound, I counted 3 pairs of almost canary yellow cords matched with Tattersall shirts (the sure sign of the very posh) accompanied by their equine partners in slightly toned down version of the “Bromley” girls' garb.
The worst dressed person? Other than your humble scribe a girl all in black other than a pair of stripy yellow blue and white wellies. I’m sorry I don’t care if Kate and Alexa rock them wellies are wellies.
So what was tasty?
The main attraction of Taste is to eat dishes from “top” restaurants but seeing as this involved queuing for ages and rather small portions, drinking seemed the best option. So a surprisingly good range of beer was sipped including Sierra Nevada , Deuchars and Coop
ers Pale Ales, Cobra, Fullers Discovery and Youngs Special London Ale.
ers Pale Ales, Cobra, Fullers Discovery and Youngs Special London Ale.Best of the free food:
Some Dorset crab, Thai’s prawns, excellent mini young’s beef pies (we had a few of these!) nice ice cream, some very good cheese from the Isle of Man, a brownie…blimey I didn’t think we’d eaten that much.
Some Dorset crab, Thai’s prawns, excellent mini young’s beef pies (we had a few of these!) nice ice cream, some very good cheese from the Isle of Man, a brownie…blimey I didn’t think we’d eaten that much.
The stalls you feel sorry for, are your condiments sellers , I can’t get excited about fancy salt even if it is cut with "Tahitian Vanilla pods" and "organic sesame seeds"!
And why the f*ck would you want rice bran oil?
M
adeleine moment.“She passed me one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the beer in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the cool liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory and I was back in that cramped “off-license” in old Streatham, the air thick with the smell of turmeric and damp, the shelves groaning with grim cellophane wrapped porn, the wheezing fridge packed with chilly cans of Stella and my mouth ,my mouth was full of the dry boring crumbs of those strangely indestructible everlasting German cakes that corner shops always stock but no one buys twice”
Tv Chefery
while waiting for BLBW to knock off I sat through a couple of cooking demo’s one from Thomisina do dah, the other from Shaun Hill a foodie hero who seemed a little bemused by the whole affair, you felt he was little to old for all this stuff.
It turns out he’s a reader in Classics at Exeter Uni so we heard tales of Ovid who had a big nose and Caesar which apparently means hairy in Latin.
The monk fish he knocked up looked good even though it all got lost in the banter between the MC the posh win e bloke off of Saturday Kitchen and a slightly over refreshed older Blonde woman who claimed to have been on blind date twice!
3 comments:
Sent By R by other means: "was just looking at your blog with the picture of Anthony Worral-Thompson and it reminded me of a fantastic line from Humph on I'm Sorry I haven't A Clue. Bemoaning celebrity endorsements on everything, he referred to a packet of sausages by AW-T. It had a big picture of him on the front and a note saying - 'Prick with a fork' "
Never thought of going to one of these things, but the beer sounds good. Coopers Pale Ale is one of my very favourite beers in the world.
And do pashmina and porn heel people drink real ale? Can't imagine the beer stalls being too busy somehow.
C:
you are of course right most people were swilling wine and more fool them. Also my mate is beer writer so we knew many of the beer people which meant our money went further ! I doubt if P wasn't going I would have gone.
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