Tag: food festival

Hot sausage and mustard! Devizes Food & Drink Festival got off to a yummy, yummy, yummy start Saturday, leaving Devizes folk with love in their tummies, exotic burgers, pies and unusual street food! But the renowned annual food festival doesn’t end with the Market, we’ve a week of grub related events ahead of us, pass the soy sauce……

Unpredictable weather didn’t prevent masses turning out for the free market in, conveniently, the Market Place. And they were blessed by a mostly clement outcome. Tucking umbrellas underarm they noshed and drank till their heart’s content with an array of interesting street food stalls, bars and music.

It was all ukuey shenanigans entertaining the feeding folk with a five-piece skiffle ensemble called the Strungout Ukuleles, and they were a satisfying choice. Surrounding them, hay bales were occupied by seated feasters, the Wadworth bar keeping them refreshed. Hawkstone was another choicest booze outlet, but being endorsed by thick slice of gammon Jeremy Clarkson put me off a smidgen, so I opted for a pint from the Dumb Post’s mobile bar, as it came with a delicious pie; not so dumb, huh?!

Food-wise we were truly spoiled for choice. Popular lunches seemed to be from the Japanese noodle stall, an Indian street food one, but particularly The Tibetan one with their tasty momos, and Calne’s vintage yellow caravan, home of Jamaican jerkin’ Miss Aubree’s Kitchen, which is like a reggae riddim ina ya belly!

Purbeck supplied the ice cream, and there were more cakes and brownies than I could even eat in a month! Stalls selling homemade sauces, preserves, gins, you name it, where there. I was instructed not to return home without fudge, which was an easy challenge and met with my approval, the fudge judge! 

Aside from our regular bustling markets, it is a lovely annual event in Devizes because we get the kind of food stalls we rarely see here, serving the kind of grub we equally don’t get to taste often. Though many assume it’s the be-all and end-all of Devizes Food & Drink Festival, and to them I say you’ve only put a little toe into the water. It continues over the week, with a variety of ticketed food-related events, ones such as we highlighted in this year’s preview and can be found on our event calendar, and on their website HERE.

Each expert in their field joins the festival organisers for a range of events, with links to the subject of food. So, Hillworth Park has a teddy bear picnic, Devizes Fire Station serves a hot dish, The Wharf Theatre has a film night, screening The Hundred-Foot Journey, Helen Mirren and Om Puri’s battle over neighbouring French restaurants, and so on; even food critic Tom Parker-Bowles is coming to town, but you better get in quick as tickets are being snapped up for the separate events with many sold out already; I did pre-warn you!

This all ends Sunday 29th September with the World Food Day at the Corn Exchange; get there by midday to ensure you get tasters of the variety of world food dishes created by local residents of respective ethnic backgrounds. They come at just a quid a dish, so fill your boots!

Once the Market Place was tidied the Devizes Food & Drink Festival moved into the Town Hall for a ticketed Italian-inspired meal with Italian food-related readings, mostly from the Devizes Writers Group and sponsored by Devizes Books and the Healthy Life Company. It was all very posh, for me, but communal, welcoming and we enjoyed it.

Rest assured those wordsmiths will be analysing my amateurish writing, so I better get my grammar in gear! From contemporary literature to the Roman Empire, we were treated to passages from various sources, from Robert Harris’ Pompeii to Guardian articles about cheese. Most memorable was Lewis’ reading from Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome, about the prankster emperor Elagabalus who teased his guests with whoopie cushions and throwing drunkards into cells with toothless lions and tigers, and Roger, Devizes answer to Brain Blessed, boldly reciting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar!

It was a great start to the festival, which continues throughout the week, you can even take your dogs to one event at Black Dog Coffee; zoinks! Scooby snacks!

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