THE FESTIVAL PARK LIFE
Sue de Groot explores the culinary globe at a British food festival
Food is a political animal. If we’re not fighting over who owns rooibos, peppadews and Cornish pasties, we’re protesting against Andalusian donkey liver in our fish fingers, or worrying about the maize price, or fretting about the amount of waste versus the spread of starvation. All legitimate concerns, but sometimes an event comes along that makes everyone happy.
This year’s 10th annual Taste of London festival was a celebration of food in all its forms and fancies. Like the sister festivals in SA, this event collects the city’s top restaurants in one place, where they sell tasting portions of their signature dishes.
When I visited the festival two years ago, Regent’s Park was swimming in culinary excess, perhaps as a rebellious stuff-you to the recession. This year’s food was just as opulent — Club Gascon’s foie gras burger, a former winner, again oozed duck fat into paper napkins — but mingled with the smoke of seared scallops was a new whiff of social consciousness.
The longest queue was for “five-star burgers” — bun by Giorgio Locatelli, patty by Valentine Warner, smoky chipotle sauce by MasterChef UK winner Thomasina Miers, dry-cured bacon from Fergus Henderson of St John nose-to-tail restaurant, and nutty comté cheese chosen by Raymond Blanc. Proceeds went to Action Against Hunger.
It might seem odd to stuff one’s face with luxury in aid of hunger, but if you think of all the people employed by the restaurant and food industries, not to mention how far a little charity can go, it made sense.
No one could try everything, but I was delighted by what I managed before satiation set in. I tried this year’s winning dish, a light yet intensely flavoured scallop ceviche with crème fraîche, radishes, fennel, dill and black quinoa, from L’Autre Pied.
IT FEELS WRONG TO DESTROY THE SYMMETRY OF THE FOOD BY EATING IT
Quinoa is London’s new panna cotta. You can’t cross a road without falling over a mound of it. I also loved Le Gavroche’s tasting glass of creamy lobster bisque. Pieces of the creature swam at the bottom in a happy haze of The Balvenie DoubleWood 12-year-old single malt.
I didn’t visit the popular Roka stand because I’d eaten at their Soho restaurant the night before. It felt wrong to destroy the exquisite symmetry of the food by eating it. But a moment of heart-stopping beauty follows: as you begin, a waitress comes to the table with a tuber from a wasabi plant, wrapped in a moist cloth to keep it fresh, and grates a mound of pure, emerald zing onto the edge of your plate. None of that synthetic stuff from a tube. I asked where the plants come from and was told they are imported from Japan, but wasabi — a water lily-like plant — is also grown by the Watercress Company in Dorset. Perhaps SA farmers of waterblommetjies could diversify into this lucrative channel.
South Africa does have a presence on the London food scene, though. At the chic Harvey Nichols rooftop café, we drank Adi Badenhorst’s honeyed chenin blanc from the Swartland. Eagle’s Nest Viognier 2010 won the Innovation Wine Award at Taste of London, and the SA stand was awash with people trying to order food. No menu was posted, but someone was frying what looked like strips of ostrich, and biltong (packaged in the UK) was on sale. We have more inventive offerings, surely? One could jostle for a place at the wine-tasting table, but no one seemed to be giving information as to what was on it.
I hate being a Nazarene, but the point of this exercise should have been to give people an elegant, organised smattering of national cuisine that sent them dashing off to a travel agent. Report card for SA Tourism: Must Try Harder. Even the Lithuanian stand had more presence, though their “cheese jazz waffles” sounded rather mysterious.
Between the restaurants and national stands were producers of fine foods from herbs to fudge to meat, cordials, alcohol, cheese and chocolate. British food lovers take the provenance of their food seriously, as I discovered over breakfast at The Goring, a hotel fit for royalty but with the friendly intimacy of a family-run establishment — a rare find in London. On the breakfast menu (no buffet in sight, thank the food gods) were Burford Brown eggs, Lincolnshire sausages and Loch Fyne kippers. The bowl of seasonal fruit contained dusky blueberries the size of marbles, and blackberries like shiny pieces of costume jewellery.
Back at the festival, Taste of London sponsor British Airways maintained the standard of excellence in their cabin-shaped stand, where guests were offered a preview of airline menus to come. Dainty sweet things have been developed in conjunction with the pastry chef from the legendary Langham Hotel, where afternoon tea is a stratospheric experience. Fine food, be it in the air or on the ground, is like art or music or dance — perhaps not essential to survival, but ever so nice to have. And London does it particularly well. Sue de Groot was a guest of BA, which has increased the frequency of its direct flights from Johannesburg and Cape Town to London during the high season. For details and prices visit www.britishairways.com.