This weekend I had the pleasure of attending Latitude Festival. For anyone that’s attended a festival with allergies, it can be fairly hit and miss. The quality of the festival usually directly correlates to how well you’re catered for.
The good thing about Latitude is that I’ve been three times in four years. I know every blade of grass and can tell you exactly where everything is, from my favourite burrito stall to where the bubble shop is.
However, this year I arrived and was informed by my wife that the food stalls had completely changed and were now being run by Street Feast. They are apparently the organisers of London’s ‘greatest food stall markets’.
For most people, especially the sort of middle class people that go to Latitude, this would be very exciting, but for me this meant that my practically pre-planned routine of going to the food stalls I know already was completely out the window.
The first problem I encountered was the queue. I know it’s a British tradition to queue, but I didn’t fancy joining one twenty people long just to be told that ‘the wedges are marinated in a parmesan cheese and truffle oil blend before they go in the fryer’.
At this point I think I should point out that the new food stalls looked amazing. There was such a huge variety of different foods ranging from standard things like fish and chips, to steamed buns and Tibetan cuisine. Whatever your fancy, you would certainly find something to tickle your taste buds here.
So, I walked around the festival casually, trying to check out the different stalls, and reading the menus nonchalantly. Being an allergy blogger has given me a sort of unjustified confidence when reading menus now.
I spied a van that I really wanted to eat at – Chai Thali Indian Street Food. But surely, like so many times before, my hopes would be dashed… but I still walked towards it optimistically. And that’s when I saw it, this beautiful piece of paper that would stop me from having to queue and worry, an allergy menu chart, pinned right to the front of their van.
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Now, at this point anyone who has a food stall, please take note, because of this chart, I ended up going to this place three times over. I chose it over the others because they could very simply tell me the dishes that I was able to have. Ok, it helps that I also LOVE Indian Street Food, but I would have happily branched out further had other stalls have been able to tell me very simply what I was allowed to have without me having to join a massive queue. I spent £50 at that stall in total that weekend, not bad for a piece of paper and 10 minutes work.
For any stalls that want to follow this example you can download a template here: https://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/media/document/allergen-chart.pdf.
The staff at Chai Thali were really friendly as well, and I had complete faith when I double checked the allergy information. I had two very nice Lamb Rogan Joshs, complete with naan bread and a delicious shish kebab. I’m very tempted to visit one of their London restaurants when I’m next in the big smoke.
My next piece of festival advice is to visit food stalls when the majority of festival goers are distracted. This means you get a chance to talk to them properly. The best example of this would be when one of the headliners are playing. Everyone is watching them and so you don’t have any queues to worry about and can leisurely discuss allergies with staff without any issues. I spoke with a number of stalls that peaked my interest and had no luck, and then I found my favourite eating out food ever. Burritos.
The Luardos burrito van is very cool with pink graffiti all over it. After chatting with the staff they were all too happy to help, making sure they changed gloves (a mantra that was repeated every time I visited). I went back four times in all, each time they remembered who I was and I was greeted with a friendly smile. I even met the van owner’s sister while waiting in the queue and she was very happy to hear me waxing lyrical about the staff there and how great they had been about my allergies.
The burritos were amazing as well, I had one chicken, one beef chilli and one of my personal favourites, the pulled pork. Each dish was fantastic in its own right, but the pork just melted in my mouth and mixed so well with the guacamole. I’ve found myself wishing I could have one multiple times since leaving the festival.
Music-wise, the festival was amazing, with Alt-J and a surprise appearance from Liam Gallagher being my highlights, but you don’t come here for my music reviews, so maybe I should have gone to some more food stalls and got some more reviews. I’d rather leave the theme of this blog to be about the two food stalls that took the time out to make life easy for me and cater for me. They really helped make my weekend and provide a really good lesson for any food stall owners out there. We tricky eaters are creatures of habit, if you prove you can feed us, we’re likely to keep coming back again and again and again.
You can see the huge variety of stalls at the festival on their web page. Just reading through them makes me wish that I’d spent more time searching round food stalls, but I was very much caught up with the great live music: https://www.latitudefestival.com/areas/food.