Taste Kerry Food Fair

ONE event that didn’t fall victim to the weekend’s often dismal weather was the Taste Kerry food fair in the Dome on Saturday.

Indeed the bad weather actually proved to be a bit of a boon for the event aimed at festival going foodies.

While the main Dome was packed with hundreds of revellers enjoying some vigorous exercise at the Inspired group’s charity Zumbathon in the Dome’s adjoining pavilion festival goers were exercising their taste buds.

The Taste Kerry event is a new and very welcome addition to the festival’s extensive free entertainment line up and it provided a platform for some of Kerry’s best artisan food and drink producers to showcase many of their wares.

Around 40 food producers from small new businesses to larger and longer established local brands took part in the Taste Kerry Food and Drink Experience with hundreds of festival goers making the trip down to the Dome to sample some of Kerry’s finest cuisine.

There were also cookery demonstrations by three well known Kerry chefs with Sid Sheehan from Nourish, Dingle Cookery School’s Mark Murphy and Noel Keane from Eabha Jones Restaurant in Listowel cooking up some fabulous dishes.

There were some slightly more disorderly kitchen scenes in the Town Square on Sunday where local chefs teamed up with well known Kerry faces including Billy Keane, Jackie Healy Rae Jnr, Brendan Fuller and Elaine Kinsella to stage a take on TV show Ready Steady Cook in the town square.

The blustery conditions were far from ideal but fair play to the chefs and their celebrity helpers they cooked up a storm and provided some very funny foodie entertainment for festival goers.

Taste Kerry, who also ran a food fair in Pearse Park on Monday, are a great addition to the festival line up and we look forward to seeing them again next year.