My sister had been at this festival last year on a Friday afternoon and had had a really enjoyable few hours so this year, she invited me along and I was really looking forward to a fun and tasty Saturday night in Dublin.

Off we set for the starting time of 5.30pm. It had been raining so we were a bit apprehensive as we approached the Iveagh Gardens entrance, which is just off Harcourt St, as this was an outdoor event. Thankfully though the organisers had dealt well with this problem and the venue was not a sea of mud, but all the exhibitors and stands had a canope over them or were in a marquee. The walkways between each were made of a hard plastic so that was grand.

As she had gotten VIP tickets we headed for a complimentary glass of champagne and a cocktail. The cocktail was a blueberry martini and was ok, I’m not a huge fan of white spirits, that is vodka or gin, but it worked well with the blueberries.

We then headed out to the various restaurants, foodie exhibitors. At this stage, the place was packed with people and there were queues for everything. The idea was that you paid from €5 to €8 for each sample. We headed to the Thornton’s restaurant stand and tried their scallop with a truffle mousse. It must be said, this was delicious. The mousse was just really a sauce around the scallop and some truffle was grated on top but it tasted fabulous.

Then to the Yo Thai’/ Chai Yo’ where I had the chicken yakitori €5, and Paula went for the tiger prawn 3 seasons €8, both of which were very good.

Still hungry, we battled on through the crowds, and reached Bang Café’s stand where we both tried the crabcake, €7. These too were good.

Last dish I tried was the seabass €7, from the Harvey Nicols restaurant.

Again this tasted great but was a very small portion.

By this stage it was approaching 9pm so we headed for the chef demonstraton arena to watch Derry Clarke from L’Ecrivan preparing 2 fish dishes and a duck one. This was quite entertaining, despite the electricity failing midway. Thankfully he was cooking on gas burners. There were 4 chef demos that night but his was the only one we made it to.

There were plenty of other exhibitors, wines were available to taste and to buy by the glass at around €5. Starbucks for coffee, ciders, beers, champagnes to sample and purchase, various food vendors with wares ranging from chocolate, cakes, bacon, sausages to smoothies and cheese.

 But I left with a feeling of disappointment. It would have been so much better if the organisers had sold less tickets. I would have liked to have had more time to check out more of the restaurants. Next time, I would probably give the evening session a miss, in favour of instead maybe trying one of the earlier weekday afternoon sessions, when hopefully there’d be less people there. An afternoon session would probably have suited me better. I also feel it was slightly overpriced. The food portions were small which was fine as many could be sampled without getting sated but the prices should be kept correspondingly fairly low.