Keeping your food as good as the music

Gone are the days of the sloppy burger and greasy chips – festival goers are chowing down on stone-baked pizza, poached salmon and gourmet pies.

THERE WAS A TIME when the only drunks at Irish music festivals were the people, but at the Body and Soul festival which took place in Westmeath last month, most of the bodies were sober and it was the strawberries that were at it.

Body and Soul, which is in its second year as a standalone event, took fancy-festival fare to a whole new level with a five-course sit-down menu, which included a “forbidden” amuse-bouche, chilled almond and wild garlic soup, pumpkin and pine nut ravioli with sage butter and yogurt and cardamom cream with drunken strawberries.

It is far from drunken strawberries and amuse-bouche most Irish people were reared. It seems like only yesterday that our summer festival season was all about events such as Lisdoonvarna and Féile – rough and ready affairs where people happily drank warm lager, ate dodgy burgers, kissed inappropriate people and watched the odd band play.

Today it’s all changed (except perhaps when it comes to the inappropriate kissing) 21st century punters have become a lot more discerning about what they eat.

Hardly anywhere is safe, not even the mighty Croker. Just before the gates of Croke Park opened for 80,000 Take That fans in June, some of the stadium’s 800 catering staff were polishing champagne glasses, tearing up mint and stirring salsa.

A few bars sold only sparkling wines and, for the first time, Fitzers, the company behind the stadium’s catering, was tempting tipplers with Mojitos and offering them Mexican food alongside hot dogs and burgers.

Judging from the queues which quickly formed at the cocktail stall once the doors opened, the move was a good one.

Despite the popularity of the new options at Take That, the hot dogs are still the top dogs.

The same is not true of the Electric Picnic, where our appetite for better festival food was born. The people who came through the gates at the first Picnic in Stradbally, Co Laois, back in 2004, marvelled at the cute boutiquey feel of the festival and were equally struck by how the vans flogging congealed grease dressed up as food had been replaced by stone-baked pizzas, gourmet burgers and all manner of curries – and not just the sort of yellowy-brown gunk you lather on your chips after way too many pints.

The quality of the food at the event became an instant talking-point and each year, as John Reynold’s Pod Concerts festival got bigger the number of food stalls offering some frankly amazing food options continued to grow. Last year, Donegal restaurant Rathmullan House wowed punters with dishes including freshly-cooked poached salmon and new potatoes while the upmarket Butler’s Pantry was selling Gubbeen chorizo, handmade croissants and a summer ministrone with basil pesto and 36-month aged parmesan.

Jacquie Marsh is the MD of The Butler’s Pantry. “We decided to take a stall last year because the profile of the festival goers matches the profile of our customers and we felt that our food would be well recieved,” she says. “The people who go to the Electric Picninc tend to be very discerning about what they eat.

“I think there was a really good reprentation of all the great food Ireland has to offer at the Picnic and I have to say Body and Soul had some really funky and unusual artisan producers. As well as having the time of your life you can eat incredibly well there,” she continues.

It is, she says, a far cry from the festivals she remembers from years gone by when people queued up “for horrific burgers and revolting chips. I think the only thing that saved us all from food poisoning was the amount of alcohol we consumed.”

Business was good for Marsh last year but despite the fact that things went so well for the Butler’s Pantry, she says she has yet to make a final decision on whether to go back for a second bite of the (no doubt organic) cherry this September.

“It really will come down to the numbers: the number of tickets sold and the number of other vendors on the site.”

This year there will be close to 150 different food retailers on-site, when the water and sweet sellers are taken into account and the Picnic organisers will once again do their best to encourage organic and Fair Trade produce where possible. To its credit it also polices prices fairly rigorously to stop caterers losing the run of themselves, and last year it had a policy which prevented vans selling bottled water for any more than €2.

Vanessa Clarke’s company looks after the catering for more than 20 festivals and major events each year, including the Tattersalls Horse Trials and the Waterford Tallships. But her first love is the Picnic.

She says Irish appetites have “completely changed in the last eight years and people have become very discerning about what they eat and I think at the Electric Picnic you get the most discerning crowd of all”.

She is a keen trend watcher and says that traditional and rustic food is likely to be popular when the gates open on September 2nd. She is “quite excited about Fiddlers Cottage pasties” and expects them to give the Pieminister a run for their money in the pie wars.

She also points to Tailor Made Fish company which offers sustainably sourced fish and chips and is bringing an oyster bar with them this year and Choux Box, a company which will offer “really really cute cakes on sticks”.

Customers are not, she insists, paying more than people in, say, Oxegen, who queued up for more conventional festival food.

“We watch the prices very closely and they are very competitive. Apart from anything else there are so many stalls on site that they have to compete with each other. You can get a really good meal from Rathmullen House for under a tenner.”

Crackbird, the dining choice of Dublin hipster’s this year has proved there is a market for pop-up restaurants. Surfing the zeitgeist (or hopping on the bandwagon, maybe?) the Picnic is adding a pop-up restaurant to the choices this year. It will serve sit-down lunches.

Clarke says she can’t reveal who the chef is but hints it is going to be someone amazing – if it’s not Gordon Ramsay Pricewatch is going to be terribly disappointed.

To compliment all the posh eats there are going to be some posh drinks too in the form of a wine bar in the Mindfield talking shop area of festival. “We figured the punters there would like a nice glass of wine,” Clarke says.

Avril Stanley runs the Body and Soul festival in Ballinlough Castle, Co Meath. It started as part of Electric Picnic but has since become a festival in its own right while maintaining a presence at the Picnic.

She is clearly passionate about the food offerings at the festival and always chooses vendors who are “passionate about their food”. “We chose the food options pretty carefully but the emphasis is not on posh but on quality. We have breakfasts with rashers and sausages and beans, which are not posh, but everything is sourced locally. We have burgers and chips too but, again, the meat is local.”

The longest queues at the festival last month were at the Chow stall which sold falafel. Unlike Clarke, Stanley says the food does cost more than you might expect to pay at a festival like Oxegen but, she says “ there has to be that extra cost because what they are selling is not mass produced.

“We are bring back a sense of who the people are behind the produce and giving them a voice and to do that the cost is worthwhile.”

Two companies – Queens of Neon and Wild Fire Catering – came together to offer a five-course sit down meal with wine in a tepee for €55 at the site.

“It was the most amazing affair. You sit down to have an incredible meal featuring wild venison in a tent and then go out and watch Lee Scratch Perry perform? You don’t find that anywhere else.”

She’s not wrong, you know.

Counting the cost

WHILE THE PRICING at the Picnic may be policed, that does not make going to a festival particularly cheap and when the tickets, food and drink and all manner of other costs are factored in there will be few people who will be left with change out of €600 for the weekend.

People will need to leave aside at least €180 for food and drink – and that is without eating or drinking that much, while the weekend ticket price is €246.35 – climbing to €274.35 if you want to take a bus to the venue.

Some of the glamping options are outlined bwelow but if you want to put up your own tent you should probably leave aside around €60 for a good tent. We’ve tried the cheapo €15 options and they are not a good idea.

The sun hat, rain poncho, wellies and flip flops (it is Ireland so you will need to bring the lot) will cost a further €120.

How to glam camp at the Electric Picnic

LAST YEAR, Pricewatch went to the Electric Picnic and was convinced to stay in a place called Tangerine Fields. The pitch cost more than €200 and for this we had our tent put up by magic elves and were given two air beds and two sleeping bag. We were also promised a better class of showers and toilet facilities. Having the tent put up was very handy and the airbed was grand but while the facilities were no doubt better than those on offer in the festival’s regular campsites,that does not mean that they were particularly good. The toilets were grim, the showers a little grimy and the queues to get into both were massive at the peak post-waking and pre-sleeping hours. It is nice to have somebody to put up your tent, however, and even nicer not to have to take it down and cart it home. See tangerinefields.co.uk

- There are way more posh options available to people at the Electric Picnic. First up are the Podpads, which sleep two adults comfortably, and by comfortably we mean in actual beds. These are positioned in amore upmarket area of the site and the shower and toilet facilities are excellent. They look like plastic playhouses but are sturdy enough to withstand the most severe weather conditions. They are also a lot more soundproof and secure than a tent, which is very handy for when your neighbours insist on playing The Blower’s Daughter on the guitar at 5am. A Podpad with twin or double beds costs €520 for the weekend, although those on a tighter budget can avail of the same company’s Bellepad, which is a tent with airbeds. The Bellepad is spacious enough to sleep four and costs the same. The NME declared the Podpads to be the best place to camp at Glastonbury, the festival for which they were invented. See podpads.com

- Then there are the tipis and yurts. Available through Hearthworks, these tents used traditionally by nomads have spacious interiors, look super-cool, offer full weather protection and come with optional furnishings. You can even get additional doorways, windows in the side wall, coloured canvas designs, wood stoves and flooring made from either sustainable hardwood or pine. Although, in fairness, if you were going to go to such extremes you would probably want to live in it full-time. All these bells and whistles options are not available for the Electric Picnic. Tipis start at more than €500 and prices climb above €1,300. The yurts start at more than €570 and go up to €1,700. See hearthworks.co.uk