The inaugural London Restaurant Festival will open tonight, with a launch ceremony taking place at D&D London’s Quaglino’s restaurant.
The festival, which runs from 8-13 October, has been created by the London Evening Standard’s food critic Fay Maschler and Simon Davis, who together run restaurant consultancy Private View.
Supported by Mayor of London Boris Johnson and tourism body Visit London, it is a citywide celebration of dining out designed to raise the profile of establishments involved and drive footfall.
The London Restaurant Festival will run as an umbrella under which a myriad of events will take place. These will include “gourmet odysseys” on London buses travelling between different restaurants from course to course; a food film festival; a Bistrotheque pop-up restaurant at the Andaz Hotel; and the biggest ever Sunday roast cooked by chefs including Fergus Henderson, John Torode and Mark Hix at Leadenhall Market.
One of the festival’s biggest highlights will be a pop-up restaurant by iconic chef Pierre Koffmann, who will recreate his former-Michelin starred restaurant La Tante Claire at Selfridges atop the Oxford Street department store for four weeks from 8-31 October.
Gordon Ramsay and six other top London chefs including Richard Corrigan, Francesco Mazzei and Vineet Bhatia, will transform one of the capsules of the London Eye into a kitchen.
The London Eye Restaurant Capsules will each night give ten diners the chance to eat food cooked by the chefs in the temporary dining room 135m above the capital.
The London Restaurant Festival will culminate in an awards gala dinner held at Soho House Group’s Pizza East on 13 October.
See the Visit London website for more details.
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By Kerstin Kühn
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