All the Fun of the Fair
All the Fun of the Fair
At the International Food and Drink Event, where Big Food is bought and sold… and is not to be eaten. Words and photos by Jonathan Nunn.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants! A Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year. If you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running — it will give you access to the whole Vittles back catalogue — including Normal Country, London restaurant guides, reviews, recipes, and all new columns.
Today, we learn that Jonathan Nunn took a wrong turn on his way to the Restaurants and instead found himself in an altogether alternative reality: the International Food and Drink Event at ExCeL London.
All the Fun of the Fair
At the International Food and Drink Event, where Big Food is bought and sold… and is not to be eaten, by Jonathan Nunn
Restaurants can be used to predict the future. Back in 1994, if you’d wanted to know how a swathe of the country might be eating in 2024, then you would have seen it all from the bar at St. John – the renewed focus on British ingredients, the revival of farmhouse traditions, the minimalist sharing plates. Dining at Superiority Burger in New York earlier this year felt like eating another version of the future, one where tofu skin is prized as if it was an expensive cut of meat and food is denatured from national cuisine. The problem with that type of gastromancy is that you rarely know which ideas are going to trickle down. And restaurants change culture slowly: in 1999, five years after St. John opened, Jonathan Meades noted in the Times that “[Fergus Henderson’s] example has not been taken up by other restaurateurs”. Similarly, Superiority Burger will only be the future when someone else manages to take its ludic spirit and make it their own, or when a corporation has worked out how to replicate it successfully. This all takes time.
So if you want to know how we’re all going to be eating in 2054 then go to Superiority Burger. But if you want to know how we’re going to be eating next year then restaurants are the wrong place to look. Instead, you need to go to ExCeL London.
Located between the Custom House and Prince Regent DLR stops, the ExCeL is a rare beast in developed London: 100 acres of nothing but space that can be made and remade to fit whatever purpose is needed. Most famously, it has been an Olympic venue for judo and the makeshift NHS Nightingale hospital during the pandemic. Once, I walked through it idly only to find myself in the middle of a national Jehovah’s Witnesses meetup. But as its day job, it hosts some of the country’s largest specialist conferences. In November it becomes the London Vet Show (“The apex of the veterinary calendar”) while in May it’s the Concrete Expo (“The UK’s most innovative show for the concrete industry”). But in March it is home to the International Food and Drink Event, or the IFE: 1,500 stalls dedicated to emerging food and drink businesses, a kilometre concourse of crisps, soft drinks, ice cream machines, luxe tonic waters, eco-friendly packaging and stalls called things like ‘Uhhmami’. The IFE is obsessed with predicting the near future: the UK’s first protein iced tea, the world’s first fermented fruit cookie, and talks titled, “The future is bright, the future is precision fermentation” or “As David Bowie said, ‘Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming’ and so is the life of a revenue manager”. At one point, I read a sign claiming that “the future is phat”.
Trade shows like the IFE are where British food actually happens – the nit and grit of it, the stuff that people often eat but seldom feel the need to write about.