Member Article

Success for food and drink festival

The first Festival of Food and Wine at Jesmond Dene House has been declared a success, now that the thousands of plates have been cleared. During the week long event in Newcastle, the hotel and restaurant greeted visitors from across Europe, hosted one-off dinners, lunches and cookery demonstrations from renowned guest chefs and showcased the North East’s food and drink heroes at a farmers’ market.

Jesmond Dene House co-owner and festival organiser Terry Laybourne says he hopes it will be the first of many such events in the North East, helping to build the region’s reputation for gastronomy. Chefs and experts who attended the event were also keen to come back for a second helping.

Terry said: “The festival has been a complex and demanding endeavour but everyone who has taken part has given 100 percent. This is the first time we’ve held an event of this kind and people in the North East have shown real enthusiasm for what we are trying to achieve. “It was intended as a celebration of producers, ingredients, styles, skills, dishes and menus, as well as the human stories that lie behind all these different elements. There has been so much variety – from Simon King the Hairy Biker and his Tales from the Road to our Entente Cordiale gala dinner, bringing together 10 English and French chefs to celebrate the culinary relationship between our two nations. It has been exhausting but hugely satisfying and I’m sure we’ll be repeating it in the future.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .