Restaurant festival off to a flying start high above the capital
The third - and biggest - London Restaurant Festival has kicked off, with 805 restaurants, from local pubs and curry houses to Gordon Ramsay dining rooms, offering special Festival menus for £10 to £30 to diners across the capital.
The two-week extravaganza has almost trebled in size since it was founded in 2009 by Evening Standard food critic Fay Maschler and Simon Davis, when 350 restaurants took part. There are more special events this year, including quizzes and debates, Gourmet Odysseys by bus and a new Tapas Tour of Five Spanish restaurants for £50.
Bookings for the festival menus are expected to hit 50,000 this year, with the £25 menus at restaurants such as Ramsay's the most popular.
The questions asked at the LRF's big food quiz at the Criterion tonight will be put simultaneously to customers in pubs across London, in a bid to stage the world's biggest culinary quiz. This year also sees guest chefs cooking at Fortnum and Mason, and a pop-up dining room and gallery, The Minotaur, in the cavernous Old Vic tunnels under Waterloo station from October 10-25.
Another innovation is the creation of Friday "suppliers markets" in London's major railway stations, featuring produce from the areas each railway line serves. Next Tuesday critics AA Gill and Jonathan Meades and cooks Clarissa Dickson Wright and Hardeep Singh Kohli will debate the motion "There is no such thing as ethnic food" at Kings Place in King's Cross.
This year's bonanza kicked off with a dinner on the London Eye cooked by Angela Hartnett of Murano in Mayfair, Massimo Riccioli of the new Corinthia hotel at Embankment, and Francesco Mazzei of L'Anima in the City who each delivered a course to diners in three of the Eye's pods.
The four-day "Pop up in the Sky" at the Eye is the jewel in the festival's crown, with patrons paying £12,500 to hire a 10-person pod.
Mr Davis said: "Our aim is to showcase how fantastic the restaurant scene is in London, and to create the culinary equivalent of the Edinburgh Festival."
londonrestaurantfestival.com.
