Columnists / bristol food
Does Bristol finally have a food festival to be proud of?
Food festivals can go one of two ways. They can be a source of local and national pride, a place where connections of all kinds are made, where illustrious careers are celebrated and seeds of ideas sown in those that attend.
Or they can be a Russian doll style affair: hollow, with layer after layer of added costs revealed – a sad circus of touring food trucks with no local reputation to sustain besieged by ‘foodies’ suffering through watered-down plastic cups of Pimms.
Abergavenny leads the former category, Foodies falls distinctly into the latter. But into which category should we sort the Feast On festival?
is needed now More than ever
The lineup read overwhelmingly well: entirely local restaurants and mostly very good ones at that. Serving food were the likes of Caper and Cure, Spiny Lobster, Gourmet Warriors and Ahh Toots. Pork cheek on crumpet from the Bank Tavern was the standout dish from the five or six that I managed to get my hands on.
Crab cakes from Caper & Cure, a phenomenal little bistro on Stokes Croft
Ticket holders were treated to an all-star programme of chef demonstrations and talks, too. Jan from Wilsons cooked a perfect piece of venison while almost accidentally making everyone laugh, talking all things food from Michelin stars to working for Gordon Ramsay.
Hannah Catley, Hugo Harvey, Nathan Ritchie and many more also shared the secrets of their creations.
And tickets started at just under £10 – notably cheaper than those of Foodies Festival, which fortunately has now upped sticks and moved to Bath.
It was busy, the atmosphere was great and to top it all off, the weather was fantastic.
But no event is going to be without teething problems in its first year; what is the one thing that a food festival should not run out of?
By 7pm on Saturday night – arguably prime time for dinner at a food festival – at least three of the seventeen food stalls had given up the ghost entirely, having run out of food. The produce hall was being packed down, despite the festival supposedly running until 10pm, and the vendors that were still open were on their last legs.
Menus were crossed out or emergency calls being made to find and deliver food, in taxis, to the Downs. The queues at stalls that were being bolstered by kitchens elsewhere were hefty. The resulting Google reviews take no prisoners.
Though there was diversity in the food being served, I saw little representation from Easton or St Paul’s. I hope that next year (and I do hope there is a next year) an increased effort is made to represent the whole of Bristol.
And with tickets so affordable, I presume Feast On organisers planned to make most of their profits on the bar – the only possible explanation for charging £6.90 for a tin of warm, cloudy Sauvignon Blanc when Snobby’s next door had been forbidden from serving wine.
And what of the traders? Though delighted to be so busy, many were disgruntled about lack of clarity on how many tickets had been sold and would have liked the opportunity to better prepare.
Furthermore, a food festival should exist to empower and support food businesses, not insist that said businesses give away food for free to influencers, for which they’d be reimbursed only 50%, to make a name for the festival at their expense.
Perhaps a food festival running out of food is the perfect signifier of success. It certainly blew Foodies out the water. To the organisers of Feast On; well done, good luck and I hope to see you in 2025.
This is an opinion piece by Meg Houghton-Gilmour, Bristol24/7’s Head of Audience. Subscribe here to her weekly food & drink newsletter.
All photos: Meg Houghton-Gilmour
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