Taste of London

There came a point last weekend during the Taste of London festival at which I felt I had gotten a little too greedy and taken too many free samples.

It was the point whereby in my left hand I had a half-eaten madeleine together with a cup containing a segment of chilli sausage with onion marmalade. In my right, I had a small portion of Lithuanian beer and a thimble of potato vodka. I had already gone through green chicken curry, organic pear cider, cookies, all-natural peanut butter and jelly together on a cracker, Parma ham, goji berry energy drinks, chai, apples and two large blocks of Parmesan cheese. What’s more I had fitted all of this into 40 minutes after arriving.

Now was the perfect time to take stock, to settle down and enjoy the produce on offer. Down went the sausage along with the Lithuanian beer. The rest of the madeleine was polished off with the vodka acting as a digestif and I waddled on to the next counter. ‘So this Buffalo mozzarella is made completely organically? That’s fascinating, do you mind if I try a bit?’

However, the purpose of the event is not to snaffle as many free samples as possible and I soon stopped my gorging to appreciate what the Taste of London has to offer. Over the past 20 years, London has long since moved away from its traditional image of banal food to become an established centre of culinary excellence. It boasts a great number of the world’s top restaurants along with a cosmopolitan mix of influences from around the world. Therefore, it only makes sense to have some sort of celebration of the diversity of tastes that the capital city has to offer.

Set up in Regents Park, the four-day festival included a large variety of produce, from knives to cookbooks to spices. It is essentially a trade fair but with the added appeal of being to be enjoyed by those not in the business of food. It even has its own currency, a system of crowns that can be used to buy different dishes from the different outlets.

The event has 40 of London’s top restaurants, each of them offering samples from their menu along with their own idiosyncratic icon dish. For example, Gary Rhodes’ Rhodes Twenty Four offers his special jaffa cake pudding, which comes in at the equivalent of £30 per serving. It is this sort of extravagance that underpins the event and reinforces the exclusivity that the top tier of London dining operates under. The Taste of London is a gathering of some of the finest cuisine that the city has to offer but you have to be quite well off to enjoy it.

Taste of London took place in the Outer Circle, Regent’s park, June 18-21.

Image by Annie Mole courtesy of Flickr