What you're doing: London Restaurant Festival special
The hospitality industry may be about providing food, drink, accommodation and service, but sometimes you have to go the extra mile to pull customers in. If you’re stuck for ideas on how to make your business more appealing take a look at what others are doing for inspiration.
This week we have selected some of the events and promotions being run at restaurants across the capital for the London Restaurant Festival (8-15 October)
Eat Film
The May Fair Hotel in London will be celebrating food and film with its Eat Film package tonight. Guests will watch the 1963 Albert Finney film Tom Jones in the hotel's private 201-seat cinema before eating the same feast served in the meal, including oysters, crusty bread, crayfish and roast chicken in the hotel's Crystal Room restaurant. Tickets are priced at £48.50 for the film and a three-course meal. Five other venues across the capital, including the Curzon cinema in Soho, will be showing food films followed by a feast over the course of the week.
Cheese and dice
Bermondsey Street's sister venues The Garrison and Village East have organised a range of events to coincide with the festival. The Garrison has teamed up with the London Cheeseboard and will be selling a range of cheeses on Saturday, offering suggestions on the best wines to drink with each and putting together cheeseboards made up of each customer’s favourites. Both venues will be serving roasts as part of the festival's The Big Roast on Sunday and on Monday guests will get the chance to eat for free by rolling a dice brought to their table. A four means food is free.
Starter for 10
Legendary quizzmaster Bamber Gascoigne will be hosting a chefs v critics quiz entitled Starter for 10 at Vinopolis this Saturday. Chefs Rowley Leigh, Jeremy Lee, Angela Hartnett and Richard Corrigan will go head to head against critics Giles Coren, Tracey MaCleod, Matthew Norman and Toby Young to answer restaurant and food-related questions in front of an audience. Tickets are £25 and include complimentary wines supplied by Field Morris Verdin.
East End favourites
Whitechapel Gallery Dining Room's head chef Maria Elia has created an East End-themed menu for the London Restaurant Festival. Starters include potted salt beef and the ‘London Particular’, a split pea and ham soup given its name by Charles Dickens in his novel Bleak House, in tribute to the brown fog, or ‘pea soup’, emitted by London’s factories. Mains include ginger beer-battered pollock, ‘Whitechapel faggots’ and Maria Elia’s signature ‘texture of curried vegetables’ – her homage to Brick Lane. A two-course lunch is £15, with three courses for £20.
