Slow food fast in Belfast

Here's a great idea for cities that want to promote their restaurants. Belfast held its second Taste and Music Fest, a smorgasbord of food and sounds. Here's how it worked. The festival went on for five days in a city park, just a large field, really, with a soundstage set up at one end and plastic tables and chairs covering the grass. Along one side were more than a dozen booths from local restaurants.

You pay to get in, and then you buy bags of tokens, which you can exchange for food. Each dish cost a handful of tokens, in the £3-4 range, or hovering just under $5. The restaurants and caterers at the booths provided a small menu, maybe one starter, one main, and one sweet (notice that we are separated by a common language again). This gave the restaurants the opportunity to innovate with dishes like:

• Salt 'n' chilli squid with spicy mayo and napa sauce from the Mourne Seafood Bar
• Kettyle Irish beef and Guinness from Deli on the Green
• Roast belly of pork, smoked apple, watercress and shallot salad from James Street South
• Kangaroo burger with a grain mustard mayo and dressed salad leaves from Australian restaurant Uluru
• Pavlova with summer berries, raspberry coulis and vanilla cream from Mango Catering and Events

The bands that played all afternoon were similarly diverse: jazz, rock, and swing, and a tent alongside was converted into a kitchen, complete with overhead mirrors, for chefs from Belfast's finest eateries to demonstrate what they do best. I watched a demonstration by Dean Coppard of Uluru, which culminated in tastes of both dishes -- kangaroo (which tastes like venison to me), and crocodile (tasted like chicken, of course, albeit a surly one.)

Chef Coppard gave advice to us that works well for travel. He said, "Don't be put off by fine restaurants. Sometimes they aren't that much more money than the place you normally go. Look for specials and fixed menus, and you can have a great meal for not much more than you'd pay for an ordinary one."