Festival starts signing up London’s restaurants
08 June 09
This image is available from the Visit London image library
The London Restaurant Festival is inviting the capital’s restaurants to register for this year’s inaugural six-day Festival taking place during 8 -13 October 2009.
Over 400 of the capital’s restaurants have already registered their interest via the festival website - http://www.londonrestaurantfestival.com - and will now be issued with official registration documents and guidelines.
The Festival has been created by Fay Maschler and Simon Davis, her business partner in the consultancy A Private View, and is supported by Visit London and Mayor Boris Johnson. It will be a highly publicised, citywide celebration of eating out which will raise the profile of establishments involved and acknowledge the pleasure and sustenance given to all by London’s extraordinarily diverse range of restaurants. In these hard times for restaurants, one of the main aims will be to entice and drive more customers into restaurants.
The London Restaurant Festival team have been working with a number of high profile London restaurants and Chef’s to create content and secure exclusive festival activities for the six-day event. Ultimately the model for the London Restaurant Festival can best be compared to the Edinburgh Festival. But where the latter’s events are about the performing arts, the London Restaurant Festival’s celebrate restaurants and food. In year one there will be around a dozen events happening throughout London, with a plan to have fifty by year three.
Marcus Wareing, Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley: “I am proud to be part of the London restaurant scene. We offer some of the best cuisine in the world from the most diverse range of restaurants. In this current climate what a great idea, a celebration of our existing restaurants and a reminder of how unique London really is. Food is fun and for six days in October everyone can see just how much!”
A key ‘event’ that all London restaurants are invited to take part in is the Festival Menu programme. Fay Maschler, the distinguished Evening Standard restaurant critic and London Restaurant Festival chair, believes that a Festival Menu should encapsulate, explain and deliver the essence of each participating establishment. Menus at different fixed price points will give potential customers confidence; places that they may have been diffident about trying become understandable and accessible.
Festival Menus provide the opportunity for restaurants of any ethnicity to convey precisely what their cuisine contributes and the part it plays in the astonishing range of restaurants that London possesses. The menus will be an opportunity to concentrate even more than usual on creativity, seasonality, surprise and good value.
Jacob Kenedy, Bocca di Lupo: “I am incredibly excited about the London Restaurant Festival – it promises a whole new perspective on the food of our magnificent city. The activities and events are imaginative, fun and intelligent. The festival may well provide a forum for restaurateurs to showcase and discuss their offerings, but will more importantly give customers a great way to get involved in our thriving foodie scene. We Brits spend more than enough time bemoaning the worse aspects of cuisine in this country – here at last is a chance for us to celebrate the highlights instead.”
Restaurant registration documents and more information on the festival’s events are available at http://www.londonrestaurantfestival.com or by emailing
The Festival will open with a high-profile launch party at Quaglino’s on Wednesday 7 October, co-hosted by Vanity Fair magazine. The culmination will be the London Restaurant Festival Awards in association with the London Evening Standard on Tuesday 13 October 2009.
Founding Partners of the London Restaurant Festival include Visit London, A Private View and Tim Etchells of Single Market Events. Festival Partners include Vanity Fair, Covent Garden London, Toptable.com, Eureka Executive Search, Taste and London Evening Standard.
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