Food & Drink Festivals: Keep the festivities firmly in the pub

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A food and drink festival sounds like just the sort of event a pub needs to drive sales. Lots of focus on local food, the chance to sample beers from...

A food and drink festival sounds like just the sort of event a pub needs to drive sales. Lots of focus on local food, the chance to sample beers from local brewers, and plenty of enthusiastic customers milling about.

The reality, though, is that quite often such events take trade out of a town's pubs and restaurants, and into specially set-up demonstration area, cookery theatres and food markets. For event organisers hoping to get local businesses on board, that's not the most helpful strategy to adopt.

It's an issue the organisers of the first Nottingham City Food and Drink Festival, which took place over four days in September, tried to address. While there were special events - such as a Ready, Steady, Cook contest hosted by James Martin - in a specially created marquee theatre in the city centre - the aim was for as much activity as possible to take place in the town's businesses.

Pat Parkes, head of finance and services at Nottingham Leisure Partnership, one of the organisers, says: "We wanted this first Nottingham Food & Drink Festival to showcase the city's diverse food and drink and remind people of what's on offer in our pubs, bars and restaurants.

"It was important to have things going on in venues around the city, as well as the cookery demonstrations and other events going on in the main festival marquee.

"We organised a number of food and drink events during the Festival, including seven beer and food tastings. These were held in different venues in the city centre and targeted at different audiences."

These events included:

  • Taste Beer and Food. Held at the city's Pitcher & Piano and hosted by celebrity chef and brewer Richard Fox, business partner to Neil Morrissey. Richard set out he the basics of beer and food matching and offered the chance to sample some of his favourite combinations
  • Beer for Women: Held at the Nottingham Slug & Lettuce, this women-only tasting, was guided by Cask Marque inspector Annabel Smith
  • Hops and Glory: Held at the Tamatanga Indian restaurant, with Publican columnist Pete Brown reading extracts from his new book about journey from Burton-on-Trent to India with a barrel of IPA
  • Beer and Ploughman's: Held at the Kean's Head, one of the finest pubs in the Lace Market, pub manager Charlie Blomeley matched items from the menu to beers from Castle Rock Brewery - including Screech Owl and stilton, and Preservation Fine Ale and pork pie.
  • Beer and Chocolate tasting. Held at Bluu with Thornton's chocolatier Ross Sneddon showcasing some of his favourite beer and chocolate matches
  • Best of British: A tasting of British beer and food at the Bell Inn, one of Nottingham's historic pubs, with manager Craig Sharpe-Weir and Nottingham Brewery's Phil Darby
  • Barbecue with Beer: Ben Bartlett, barbecue champion and catering development manager for Scottish & Newcastle Pub Enterprises, demonstrated why no barbecue is complete without a beer - and it can be so much more than a can of lager.

The event proved a success for the venues involved. Charlie Blomeley has competed in the Ready, Steady, Cook event before hosting the beer and food session in the Kean's Head. She says: "After cooking on stage, it was good to come back to the pub and chat informally about the beer and food matching with customers - I much prefer that approach."

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