Bath Restaurants

Can it really be a year since the first ‘Flavours of the West’ festival dominated Milsom Place? The short answer to that question is no, as the inaugural event took place on the first weekend in July last year. This seasonal differential may account for the vast difference in the weather (drab and overcast for this year’s fest, as opposed to about as Mediterranean as Britain got in 2009), but even so, the weather wasn’t the only thing that made a difference to this year’s get-together.

Last July, The Pig was disgruntled by a festival that promised to fly the flag for the local food scene but, in our opinion, verged on failure to deliver the goods (see News archive for our previous review). But this year, a distinctly less commercial aspect to proceedings – lighter on branding, and far less of the heavy-handed emphasis on the ‘exclusivity’ of the Milsom Place shopping experience as a whole – brought a vibe that verged on that of a church fete to the cobbled lanes within a complex that lends itself extraordinarily well to such an event.

While The Pig estimates that, by comparison to last July, this year’s festival attracted only around a third of the number of producers flaunting their wares from temporary stalls, quality rather than quantity was the order of the day, with the Thoughtful Bread Company and Bath Pig Chorizo proving to be the most popular shopping/tasting opportunity attractions and the pop-up cafe courtesy of the Bath Soup Co efficiently handling a roaring trade.  Meanwhile, the upper-level Octagon exhibition space played host not to a star-spangled array of local ‘celebrity’ chefs, but to a thoughtfully selected collection of artisan producers, including a wild food expert, a cheese maker and a head honcho from the Bradford on Avon based Quoins Vineyard, who talked us through a typical day in the life of a fascinating enterprise.

Now it has to be said that the lower-key aspect of this year’s ‘Flavours of the West’ festival possibly has less to do with organisers who are keen to ensure that the commercial/franchise enterprise side of ‘Bath’s most elegant shopping complex’ continues to thrive, and more to do with the fact that next weekend’s Coffee Festival (Bath Recreation Ground) and the forthcoming foodie mega-shebang that is the Bath Food and Drink Festival (Victoria Park, July 3 & 4) has attracted this year’s big sponsorship bucks away from smaller events such as this. But The Pig firmly believes that such a shift only serves to emphasise the importance of genuinely locally-sourced events; real foodies are not – and never will be – impressed by the emperor’s new clothes.