Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2020 program launch
A spaghetti street party, all-you-can-eat chips, and an ode to the beloved Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book are among the offerings at the upcoming Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.
Eating Out
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It’s a whole lot of fun vegging out – just ask Shannon Martinez.
The non-vegan chef who has made plant-based eating for carnivores cool at Smith & Daughters will get the party started at Welcome to the Jungle, a Friday night of plant-based treats, tatts and pot plants.
It’s just one of more than 145 tasty events across Melbourne next March that makes up the 2020 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival program, which is launched today.
The Queen Victoria Market will be the 2020 festival hub of gastronomic good times, where a series of parties, workshops, dinners and free talks from some of the world’s most innovative, exciting and enlightening chefs will be held.
“Festival 2020 is all about making it fun, and making it as easy as possible for everyone to be a part of it, whether it’s free talks and demos from the coolest cooks in the world, a huge family-friendly spaghetti festa, a day of spicy Chinese food and cold beers, a big rock ’n’ roll Middle Eastern feast cooked over a fire, or just an epic Friday evening session for the whole city with a lot of chips,” festival creative director Pat Nourse says.
Free events are a focus of this year’s festival, with a Sichuan Snack Fair and The Big Spaghetti street party taking over QVM on the first and second Sundays respectively set to draw thousands of hungry Victorians keen to sample spicy Chinese and piles of pasta cooked by some of the best in the business.
The opening night party Maximum Chips is a hot potato chip chow-down hoedown, where $32 gets you all the crinkle cuts and shoestrings and French fries you can handle and a drink, too, while Attica’s Ben Shewry closes the festival with a curated program of music, discussion and performance around the topic of “hope and community”.
Alison Roman has been dubbed “the New York Nigella” for her easy-breezy no-fuss style of cooking and she will bring her best-selling book Nothing Fancy to life over canapes and drinks as part of the festival, as well as appearing at Shed X – a series of free talks and demonstrations at the Queen Victoria Market.
Maha’s Shane Delia welcomes some of the world’s most interesting Middle Eastern chefs to Melbourne – Eyal Shani from Tel Aviv, Michael Solomonov from Philadelphia and London’s Lee Tiernan – to cook a communal Middle Eastern “Mixed Grill”.
Other top international chefs and food personalities in town for the event include Chinese cookery expert Fuchia Dunlop, Ottolengi chef and author Helen Goh and Ed Verner from Auckland’s acclaimed Pasture restuarant.
Kicking off the 10-day festival, three of Melbourne’s culinary greats – Philippe Mouchel, Jacques Reymond and Stephanie Alexander – will cook together for the first time, designing a three-course meal for 1600 of their nearest and dearest in Treasury Gardens for the festival’s signature event, the Bank of Melbourne World’s Longest Lunch.
Celebrating 40 years of Australia’s most-loved cookbook, the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book will be brought to life with 100 of the cake designs on show at the NGV across the festival, while sellout events, including the Crawl and Bite progressive dinners, the Global Dining Series of chef collaborations and a series of unmissable one-off “special events” held at restaurants across Melbourne, return for the 2020 festival.
Food and Wine Victoria CEO Anthea Loucas Bosha says making Queen Victoria Market the exciting new home of the festival brings two of Melbourne’s iconic food names together.
“We see a great future for the festival at the Queen Victoria Market … to bring an even bigger audience to the largest open-air market in the southern hemisphere,” she says.
“This collaboration is as natural as it is exciting – the festival that celebrates the food of Melbourne coming together with the home of the food of Melbourne.”
Tickets for the full MFWF 2020 program are on sale from 9am today at MFWF.com.au