Brighton's new food festival ends tonight with a seven-course Syrian supper

The first BrightonFoodStory³ ends tonight with a seven-course Syrian dinner at Scotties Café, cooked by Chef Tony. Tickets are £35 and it starts at 5pm.

The festival has been running since Friday. It’s the work of Gilly Smith, a food writer, author and podcaster, who has wanted to put on a food festival in Brighton since 1998. That year she went to one in Melbourne, saw a market of the city’s best restaurants with chefs cooking on a stage in the middle, and came home with the idea.

Twenty-seven years later, she built hers around the stories behind the food rather than trade stands: who grows and makes it, and where it comes from. On Saturday, New Road became Food Street, with stalls from At The Table Deli, Real Junk Food, Riddle & Finns, Savvy Ferments, Bayit Bagels, Brighton Gin and the Brighton & Hove Food Partnership among others. Redroaster’s terrace hosted a free day of talks on school food, hospitality and building a local food economy, with Riverford founder Guy Singh-Watson on the bill.

Smith told Brighton on the Inside¹ that she wants people to realise they have some agency as customers. She’d be happy if someone walked into a restaurant afterwards and asked: “Where do you get your meat, fish and dairy from?”

She also has a case for oysters and mussels, which are among the more sustainable kinds of animal protein. “We need to be eating more molluscs,” she said.

Food security comes up too. “We have to be food secure,” she said. “We have to create a local food economy in our own cities.” She’d like to see more beans and pulses grown on the South Downs and more local food in Brighton’s schools.

The festival was put together without a sponsor, and most of it was free. Smith hopes it will come back on the first weekend of every October.