TASTE OF LONDON, REGENT'S PARK

Taste of London is my idea of Heaven - a food festival in Regent's Park with 40 of London's best restaurants offering some of their most popular dishes. There are cookery demonstrations by some of London's top chefs and also an abundance of stalls from artisan producers and premium brands.

It is also Pascal's idea of hell - lots of people, eating standing up and queueing!!

However he very kindly offered to go with me this weekend and boy I had a feast. I started at Barbecoa with slow roasted pit beef with new york slaw, ketchup and beef dripping crumble. This was great - the meat was so tender and went perfectly with the slaw. I can imagine it would taste even better with the fantastic views the restaurant has of St Paul's cathedral.

We then had a kebab by Sabrina Ghayour for Action Against Hunger - it was an eastern spiced chicken and pomegranate shawarma with yogurt sauce, mint, tomatoes, pomegranate seeds and pomegranate molasses - this was good but a bit dry - not my favourite. It was a shame as Sabrina Ghayour is an absolutely phenomenal chef.

Next was asparagus, pea and goat's cheese croquettes with wild garlic pesto from Ember Yard. These were so good I forgot to take a photo!! I definitely need to go to this restaurant.

I obviously needed to have a burger and my top choice was meat liquor and it didn't disappoint. I had the deep hippie burger which was a mustard fried beef patty, dead hippie sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and minced white onions. This was delicious - cooked pink with the right amount of cheese and sweet crisp pickles….very messy though!

After the burger, it was only right we had a hot dog from Bubbledogs - I had the BLT (bacon, lettuce and truffle mayonnaise) - I wasn't expecting anything amazing but I was very pleasantly surprised - it was really good. The sausage had a bit of a kick to it and I adored the truffle mayonnaise…even Pascal raved about it!

It was now time to move onto the sweet stuff. I started with a mini salted caramel cupcake and a mini mars bar crisp from the Primrose Bakery - 5 stars to both - I will definitely be trying to recreate these at home.

My favourite dish of the whole festival was the salted caramel soft whip with honeycomb from Tredwells. It was so good I have now added Tredwells to the top of my restaurant list. I could have eaten about 10 of these puddings!!

I finished off with the malted marshmallow peanut butter frozen custard with chocolate covered pretzels from Shake Shack. This was good but not a patch on the salted caramel soft serve!

I could have actually eaten more (oink oink) as there were so many good things to choose from however I didn't want to explode. Plus we had already spent a small fortune on entry tickets and all the food and Pascal was ready to sit down!

All in all a lovely day, I will definitely be making this a yearly occurrence!

Taste of London