Festival of Food & Drink

This is our third year attending this event and it keeps getting better. This year the event was larger and more spread out which made the visit up and down the rows of stalls much easier. A lot more of a gap would be beneficial though just to make it less claustrophobic. Easy to find, chesterfield say to park, chesterfield say to enter. Cooking shows in the main tent are always overfilled as is the side show events (pasta making, wine tasting etc).
I love the live music in the food eating area but there is a real lack of seating available once you have purchased from the many vendors.
It needs more seating, more side events to attend (otherwise it’s just food stalls with a cooking display from minor known chefs and food vendors).
It’s not worth £20pp as we buy goods from the vendors but the displays were full when we went so we paid to shop. Please do better

This is a nice day out, not great. It is well organised, easy to get to and has good parking. The site is a field in Clumber park that is transformed into two event areas: 1 for the food and drink stalls with a live demo stage and 1 for the plethora of food and drink outlets (vans and pop up kitchens. This is my second time attending this and my honest review of a Sunday ticket. I. Context they had 7000 visitors on the Saturday. We arrived around 1100 and headed to the live food event to watch a demonstration by Jean-Christophe Novelli, unfortunately it was cut short due to technical issues with the induction hob, and the demo ended. Hats off to Jean-Christophe for being numerous but disappointed. We then decided to walk round the trade seller stands. This is where Sunday let’s itself down. There were a lot (30%) of stands that had sold out of most of their products. Great for them but not the Sunday ticket holders. This was also the case at some of the hot food vending stands and one stand even packed up around 1300, when the event was open until 1630. However…..my highlight this year was sat in the food seating are marquee, listening to the banter and music from the Welsh tones of John Adams. I’m not a live music attendee but I was blown away. Great voice, great selection of music and great rapport with the audience. Sat there for about an hour.
All in all, it’s still a cheap day out, prepare for UK weather (sunny for this visit), some queues, and go listen to the music.