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Since lockdown basically cancelled summer 2020 there’s been all sorts of putative ‘virtual festivals’ to make the next few months not seem like a big, hot, dry washout. Now a London initiative is putting its money where its mouth is and actually delivering. The Great Feast of London is a mix of top chefs, big-name festival-ly DJs and the usual attendant sideshows: meditation, painting yourself and your children (probably) and ‘talks’. It’s like Wilderness without the risk of bumping into David Cameron (unless he lives in your garden).
It’s the brainchild of Street Feast founder Dominic Cools-Lartigue and young entrepreneur Bejay Mulenga. The idea is to do a virtual festival, but with real food. Which sounds complicated. Real food is hard enough to get right at a real festival, after all. Anyway, over this coming weekend (Friday July 3 to Sunday July 5), you can sit back and enjoy the fun from the comfort of your sofa, stoop, safe space or local park, while food prepared by some of London’s best restaurants wings its way to you. You can even do live cookalongs.
The culinary talent involved includes Ollie Dabbous, Nuno Mendes, Neil Rankin, James Cochran, Jeremy Chan, Patty & Bun, Dumpling Shack, Kricket, Eggslut, Happy Endings, Snackbar, Lagom, Mei Mei and Taco Queen, while the music comes courtesy of DJ sets from Goldie, Tom Findlay of Groove Armada, Felix Buxton of Basement Jaxx, Don Letts, Jazzie B and Sean Rowley, with the festival broadcast live by Soho Radio. Full line-ups for the three days are below.
Most of the events will be free to attend while hot meals and DIY food kits will be available at a ‘range of prices’. If you’re worried that it all sounds a bit bougie and self-indulgent, for every food order during the Great Feast, A Plate for London will donate a meal to a hungry Londoner in need.
On the subject of food, the Great Feast is promising a cool and revolutionary delivery concept. The ‘Right Time’ attempts to bring a bit of soul to home delivery by basing it on the idea of booking a table at a restaurant: you say when and where you want it, and when it arrives it comes with a personal note from the chef, an accompanying playlist and – in the case of the meal kits – a link to a cooking class to take part in. As an added benefit, restaurants keep a higher percentage of every bill to help support the industry.
So there you go: at least one weekend of your summer 2020 sorted.
The line-ups:
The Great Feast of London, Fri Jul 3-Sun Jul 5. Venue: round yours. Find out more about A Plate for London.
More great London restaurants doing home delivery at the moment.
Find more ways to help out your fellow Londoners right now.