Food Heroes Festival

August 16, 2014 by Rachel Kershaw in Eating Out 6

Yesterday lunch time I managed to escape from the office for an hour to check out the Food Heroes Festival that’s currently taking over the area around Grey’s Monument as part of ‘EAT! Out‘.

A couple of colleagues joined me too but I think it was the lure of the yummy food stalls from some of the North East’s finest food heroes and not my scintillating company that persuaded them to detour from their usual sandwich shop!

The sun was shining and the atmosphere was buzzing but the first thing I noticed as we walked up Grey Street was the wonderful waft of tantalising aromas coming from the stalls.

I spotted some of my favourite vendors straight away like Fenwick, Northumberland Cheese Company, Piggin Lush, Electric East and Marco Polo who I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at similar events before. But I also noticed lots of other local restaurants and suppliers who had embraced the ethos of ‘EAT! Out‘ and made the effort to bring their chefs out of the kitchen and in to the festival.

Artisan at The Biscuit Factory was one such stall that caught my eye… The restaurant was formerly known as David Kennedy’s Food Social but now North East Chef of the year winner Andrew Wilkinson heads up the team and I’ve been meaning to try it out for a while. I was very tempted by their take on fast food, the ‘Big Mack’ with it’s fresh mackerel looked delicious but in the end I gave in to the irresistible smell coming from the Sausage Emporium!

I’d recently read about the Sausage Emporium on a blog post by the lovely Chloe Dawson who had me drooling with her descriptions so I had to try it for myself and opted for Wylam sausages in soft fluffy white bread (very naughty as I’ve been trying to avoid bread!) Needless to say, I was well satisfied!

Before we set off back to the office to make the rest of our work mates jealous with our lovely lunches, we stopped by the demonstration tent to cheer on local chef Gareth Kyle who is attempting to break a World Record for the longest chef demonstration.

As you may have read in my previous post, the 37 hour record was recently smashed so Gareth is now aiming to constantly cook for a mammoth 41 hours and will serve up over 100 dishes for passers by! As I write this, he’s about half way through his challenge so if you’re reading my post before 9.30pm on the 16th August be sure to show wor’ Gareth your support!

If you can’t get to the festival, check out the live steam here: http://www.newcastlegateshead.com/eat-festival/GoGareth

You can also tweet your messages of encouragement using the hashtag #GoGareth

The Food Hereos Festival is open 10am – 5pm Fri 15th August – Sunday 17th August, do let me know what you sampled if you made it to the event!