Another second weekend in September, another Ludlow Food Festival. However this festival had an air of jeopardy about it; a few days before the opening of the event the local press had publicised news from the organising committee that this year was the year which might see the end of the festival, “use it or lose it”. Visitor numbers, once about 20000 had fallen in the post-COVID years to 12 to 14000 and the costs of putting on the show had risen enormously since the pandemic.
But there was something else - DIVERSITY, the bane of the modern western world, had raised its ugly head. But not in the form we would normally expect it to take. It is a clear fact that anyone who visits the festival would instantly notice that more than 99% of the visitors are white. Not so surprising perhaps as the vast percentage of the local population is also white. But racial Woke was not the cause of the diversity controversy surrounding the festival as we might have expected, it emerged - it was the alleged lack of social class diversity. The festival’s detractors were alleging that the entrance fees and the separation of the festival inside Ludlow castle and the rest of the town as demonstrated by the end of the SausageTrail, as they saw it, meant that the festival was a treat for the comfortably off middle class and was too expensive for the real workers from around those parts to be able to afford to go to.
The general will among the Ludlow locals was that entrance should be free and the events should be more meaningful to what was effectively, as they saw it, the great unwashed. They wanted more music, not appreciating perhaps that this was a food festival and not a music festival. I certainly do not travel all the way from the south western slopes of England’s second city to listen to the twanging of the guitar strings of a south Shropshire busker, rather I visit the Food Festival to see leading West Midlands chefs preparing their signature dishes and to listen to them relating their tales of their life in the restaurant business. And let’s be realistic - everything must be paid for.
Myself, I miss the Sausage Trail but a local I was speaking to, told me that one of the participating local butchers made a financial loss on the event but it was immensely popular, within the budget of the less-wealthy locals and I suspect, drew to it, sausage lovers from far and wide and of course it connected the intracastle events to the rest of the town. It was a partial answer to the complaints of the Festival critics who fear that the Festival has become a cesspit of social inequality and to be honest, it was just plain good fun (my dog had her own ticket every year and had the time of her life roaming around Ludlow being fed a multitude of sausages everywhere we stopped). Plain good fun - ah, that’s a thing of the past, that’s for sure.
The 2026 Festival planners had responded to the complaints. They had decided that they would address the diversity issue by reducing the role of local and British chefs and instead invited speakers of various nationalities and races - Italian, Cypriot, Malayan, Indian, Saudi - to take the principal stage and throw in a handful of British cooks/chefs notable for their production of fast food or easy to cook recipes which they promoted on social media or popular television. The organisers seemed to me to have missed the point - they were addressing the racial/national diversity issue and not the problem which seemed to be at the top of the agenda, that of a divorce between the less well-off locals and the festival.
I arrived at lunchtime, Friday (the first day) - too late to attend the talk/demonstration by Nathan Outlaw, the one distinguished chef on the programme who weirdly had been allocated the first, early morning session of the first day (like a warm-up act) which many visitors were unlikely to be able to attend - and after checking in with Lucy the Labrador at The Feathers, I headed for the castle only to find that the number of visitors present were barely more than you might expect at a village fete.
I listened to a talk by Marcus Bean, a private chef described as, “a self-taught chef whose culinary journey began in the rolling hills of Shropshire” and this was satisfactory enough and then, in the evening, I attended the Slow Food Banquet which I had found to be excellent the previous year. This year’s was, to be frank, mediocre. It seemed that Chef Steve ‘The Hungry Guy’ Guy, who had done such a good job in 2025, was spending too much time trying to push his own obsessions on to his diners rather than concentrating on providing them with a pleasing, exciting and delicious meal worth travelling, as in my case, forty miles to come and eat.
It is praiseworthy of course that the chef has made a cause célèbre out of the need to repurpose food that would otherwise be wasted. I am old and was brought up in an age where people did not waste food and indeed felt pain when uneaten food was thrown away. I still do. But there was much about this meal that said his obsession was overriding the good of his customers.
The meal was edible and even tasty but not as good as Chef thought it was. There was also the issue of the main course which Guy said had been prepared by some Sudanese students who were members of a Sudanese community, presumably asylum-seekers, to which he had an outreach role. The sourcing of the lamb used for the stew was not mentioned but my suspicions were confirmed that it must be halal meat when I asked one of the waiting staff who confirmed that it was. It is true to say that, according to the RSPCA, 88% of halal meat is stunned prior to slaughtering (as compared to kosher meat where none of the slaughtered animals are prestunned) but that still leaves 12% of creatures which die in distress and I find it absolutely unacceptable to be made to eat meat where there is a chance than an animal has been killed cruelly. There is also the religious element which probably does not bother too many ordinary punters in this areligious age whereby some diners are being served food which has had religious rites carried out around it with which they are not comfortable, not being adherents to that particular religion. It is not acceptable to serve the meat of slaughtered beasts, potentially unstunned prior to death, over whom religious rites have been carried out which may be alien to the diners, without informing the diners about the nature of the meat. No matter how friendly, enthusiastic and welcoming Guy had found his Sudanese students to be, he should not have served the dish without warning the diners about the nature of the meat and giving them the opportunity to opt out.
In fact there was a vegetarian opinion, which I requested when I found out the nature of the source of the meat, which took the form of a reasonably tasty and spicy bean stew though, on the whole, it was unremarkable and nothing that almost anyone could not have cooked with ease at home. When I dine out, and pay a not inconsiderable sum for the pleasure of doing so, I like to think I am eating better prepared food than I can manage at home. In short, this all had the air of woke around it; woke which has ruined the pleasure of so much in recent years but I won’t drag this on any further.
 |
| Marcus Bean |
 |
| Shane Holland |
The Slow Food Feast had been introduced by Shane Holland, the slow food impresario and the rest of Guy’s meal was made up of a watery and astoundingly undelicious spritz of ‘repurposed lime and lemon’, the best course of all which was simply made up of some excellent slices of bread served with miso butter, delightful Shropshire salumi, sweet and tangy pickled vegetables, a tahini dip and interesting crushed marrow. Quite simply, something as basic as this where the chef has hardly any work to do in preparing it should not be the highlight of the meal but it was.
 |
| Steve Guy |
The next course, equally simple, was also enjoyable - cuts of Fordhall Farm maple roast ham and shards of toothsome salty bacon with a pleasing and edible chick pea salad - all very tasty and riven with eclectic textures. Then came the ‘surplus lamb’ Sudanese stew which pleased those who ate it - that is - virtually everyone apart from myself - and the mixed bean stew paired with ordinary sliced white bread which seemed bizarre - how much better it would have been if Steve Guy’s Sudanese students had stretched themselves to producing some flatbread to accompany the stews.
I have not photographed the remaining two courses - first, a selection of slices of cheeses past their “best by” dates. These were fine though one particular soft cheese was so overripe it looked as though it was going to crawl off the plate, across the table and slide on to the floor. The cheeses were accompanied by a ‘chorizo and cola’ jam which was simply vile and commercial crackers with a sell by date of three months previous. The dessert was a hyper sweet Eton mess which included ‘gleaned stewed apples’ and surplus fruit (which were delicious and played a grand role in countering the extreme sweetness of the Eton mess. There was a detectable and welcome salted caramel sauce hidden in there somewhere and of course the intense sweetness was inflicted by ‘surplus’ meringue. The mess to be shared by six diners was served on a large plate for them all to share and it all looked unappealingly messy and unattractive. Not a successful evening I think.
My first breakfast at The Feathers brought with it very nicely cooked scrambled egg and with the dog walked, fed and watered it was off to the second day of the festival, it of course being Saturday which is usually by far the busiest day of the weekend. And as the day went on, and with the autumn weather being mostly clement, there were indeed good sized crowds at the festival, though still thinner in numbers than I can remember seeing in most years past.
The first talk and demonstration I attended was also the best of the weekend and was given by Andrew ‘Murf’ Murphy, one of the founders of The Beefy Boys which of course is not a boy band but a commercial company which makes and sells award-winning burgers and has several shops including its base restaurant in Hereford. I have not hesitated to write in the past that I am not a burger man but if ever a company in England has achieved so much in the field of burgerology then those burgerphiles are the Beefy Boys. Murphy outlined the company’s award winning successes in burger-making competitions in Britain and America and talked in the style of a scientist about his discoveries towards the perfecting of the burger and the production of appealing new burgers. It was all very impressive and we should be proud that the Beefy Boys burgers were born here in the West Midlands region. Murf in many ways is the burger equivalent of Heston Blumenthal and I say, “all power to his meat grinder”.
 |
| Andrew ‘Murf’ Murphy |
Murphy’s first book, The Beefy Boys, was published in 2024 and I was delighted to obtain a copy and have the author sign it. It’s really very good. I also bought a signed copy of Sam Bilton’s Much Ado About Cooking which is also proving to be a good read.
I sat through and generally enjoyed talks from a couple of the diverse collection of cooks, all of whom had books to sell on cuisines from various countries - Mallika Basu on Indian cuisine and Madeeha Qureshi on Saudi Arabian cooking. In the evening I was expecting to attend the Fire Feast as I had done the previous four or five years but when I looked at my ticket I realised that I had once more, by mistake, reserved a place at the Slow Food ‘Feast’ and so I trooped off once more for the second round of that particular event and endured the same menu as the night before.
 |
| Mallika Basu |
 |
| Madeeha Qureshi |
Sunday morning got off to a good start with a splendid demonstration of fresh pasta making by the charming Ursula Ferringo and then I wandered around the fairly quiet castle grounds to accidently listen to the first few minutes of talk on Is the UK Secure and Prepared for Food Shocks? delivered by the distinguished septuagenarian academic Professor Tim Lang, his voice deep with authority and gravity and full of an unsettling air of doom. Enough of that, as I headed off to listen to a presentation (with food samples) by Andy Link - a real chef at last - Chef Patron at the Riverside Inn at Aymestrey, who was pondering the Future of hospitality - rebuilding an industry in crisis.
 |
| Ursula Ferringo |
 |
| Tim Lang |
Link’s talk was interesting as he highlighted how difficult the last twelve to twenty four months have been for restaurants in particular and the hospitality industry in general. He highlighted that the major problems were costs, the staffing crisis and crushing business rates and taxes. Link described how he and his business were attempting to face down these problems. Regarding costs, he reported that growing a restaurant’s own ingredients and foraging were ways to reduce the price of ingredients and he described how changing to new, innovative and cheaper products and ingredients was a way of dealing with the current situation. As an example he highlighted the invasion of British waters by octopuses, the population of which had increased by a staggering 7700% over the year and which were consuming our own native marine products. Training the British dining public to eat, and perhaps even enjoy, octopuses was a way of making use of a new, readily available and cheap ingredient to substitute for traditional and disappearing edible marine life and to keep costs down. He provided each member of the audience with a piece of nicely cooked octopus, textured as the cliché has said, like ‘chicken’ though certainly mildly marine in flavour. Link stated that braising on a low heat would render up to the cook and their diner, a delicious piece of octopus meat and his sample seemed to confirm what he said.
Then there was the question of what available meat might be used more to reduce costs and the answer was venison and to prove his point he supplied all the audience with a wonderful venison carpaccio. Seasonality was important too - as a starter, serve gazpacho in this hot summer weather we have experienced - cheap to produce and apt for this overheated climate we are constantly being threatened with. To illustrate this, Link provided a little shot glass of thick cucumber gazpacho which was very pleasing. I have mentioned in previous blogs my desire for gazpacho and my urging some chefs to provide it in these summer months and so I am pleased that one professional chef at least is promoting that little summer pleasure.
 |
| Andy Link |
Cucumber gazpacho:-
Carpaccio of venison:-
Other points highlighted by Andy Link included the present iniquities imposed by this monstrous Labour government (my words, not his) - the taxation imposed on his restaurant has increased by a staggering £110000 this year. With the weight of this burden only one in ten hospitality businesses will make a profit in the coming year.
Problematical too for the restaurateur is the acquisition and retention of staff who no longer are prepared to work reasonably long hours to gain vital experience and forge ahead with a career but prefer to work twenty hours per week to ensure their work-life balance is weighted heavily in favour of an easy life. The annual staff turnover rate for hospitality businesses is 75% and the annual staff turnover figure for hotels is an unbelievable 103%. Link tries to retain his young workers by holding group meetings and listening to staff members’ concerns and anxieties - 50% of hospitality industry staff report that they experience mental health problems - as well as providing training. This approach is costly but Link feels it is better to spend money on retaining staff than meeting the costs of recruitment.
Presently two hospitality businesses close every day in Britain. Food for thought.
In the afternoon, back to the Food Theatre for the festival’s last cooking demonstration from the likeable Ramie Saidi who spoke about Malayan food and then back to my temporary home for the weekend at The Feathers for dinner (see Blog 562).
Farewell, to the Ludlow Food Festival for 2026. I hope it will be back in 2027 but time will tell.
 |
| Ramie Saidi |
Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.
No comments:
Post a Comment