I suppose, in a land that gave us Nigella, the Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, the topic of good food was bound to attract a lot of interest. Since I was going to miss Ottawa’s Wine & Food Fest, I opted to attend London’s equivalent: an event called MasterChef Live!

I gather that MasterChef is a BBC TV show, sort of like Iron Chef except that they have more cooks and double the time to make something with the theme ingredient. I don’t think they have that show in Canada.

Anyway, the food fest: one big difference between the one here and the one in Ottawa is that they’re less uptight about alcohol here. Instead of issuing beer-wine tickets, the local wine sellers either offered free samples (free samples of wine — mmmmmmm) or dealt with you on a strict cash basis. For example, one seller, for ten pounds ($20), let you have four samples of French champagnes (and yes, they were all from the Champagne region) along with a full glass of the one you liked best.

I like that sort of attitude. Much more relaxed, much more mellow, than the way they do it in Ontario.

One thing I also noted was that the portable, disposable wastebins all over the place (where you could dump the plastic biodegradable cups) were all labelled “spittoons.” And that actually taught me something about wine-tasting at these fests: you’re not expected to swallow the entire sample, for fear of being rude. I probably threw out about two-thirds of the samples I’d tasted.

Result: I don’t feel drunk, and I’m not expecting a hangover tomorrow either.

For all intents and purposes, I’ve got one more day in London. I think I may pay a visit to Carnaby Street and see what the fuss is all about.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 15:30 and is filed under Explorations, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.