Few days to go until food festival
OVER 1,000 tickets have already been sold in advance of this year’s East Midlands Food Festival and foodies can look forward to an exciting weekend of food and theatre from 6-7 October 2018 in Melton Mowbray – the UK’s Rural Capital of Food.
The theatre line up has been changed for this year’s event with new additions to the usual line up.
TV celebrity chefs Marcus Bean (raised in Oakham) and Jo Pratt (raised in Melton – Flexible Vegetarian - Midday Meals) will be joined by Lincolnshire food celebrity, Rachel Green (Partridge & Pork) and Stapleford Park’s Tony Fitt. The Cooking Maharaja will be talking about samosas, Stephen Hallam from Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe about, what else, the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie. Teresa Bovey will introduce the proceedings with her family recipes with a twist.
New entrants in the street food area will be Greek food, Indian fish & chips, Big Melt cheese sandwiches, mussels and sea food, and savoury and sweet crepes. These are in addition to the now traditional Indian offerings, stone cooked pizza, paella, massive Polish sausage baps, burgers, hog roast, Caribbean – in effect, around the world in 80 dishes.
A number of new exhibitors will also provide additional variety; for those who can’t wait until November’s ChocFest, there will be a wall of chocolate, German chocolate kisses and hot waffles draped with chocolate sauce. On the savoury side, new charcuterie offerings and adjacent smoked and barbeque products make use of Melton’s pork offerings besides our world famous pies.
Taking advantage of the current fashion for spirits, there will be new offerings for locally produced gin, vodka and English rum. The monks of Leicestershire’s Mount St Bernard Abbey will be showcasing their new Trappist beer.
Leicester’s award-winning DMU gospel choir and the Melstrum Ukulele Band will be providing the entertainment this year. For kids under 16 (who get in free), there’s a Kids Zone with plenty of activities to entertain and educate them about food.
Tickets are priced at £6 (£5 in advance). Children under 16 enter free. Advance tickets are on sale from the Visit Leicester centre in Leicester and Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe in Melton Mowbray, or online from www.meltonmowbrayfoodfestival. co.uk
Matthew O’Callaghan, organiser of the East Midlands Food Festival said: “This will be our largest event for years with new producers, new offerings in the street food area, an updated theatre programme with of course, the old favourites that make our festival one of the leading regional food festivals in the UK.”