Sydney Food & Wine Fair: get your eat and drink on

30^th October 2010 from noon to 5pm Sydney Food & Wine Fair @ Hyde Park

Good food, good wine, sunshine, picnic rugs and entertainment. It must be the Sydney Food & Wine Fair, which was celebrating turning 20 this year. I often think that there is nothing better than sitting somewhere in the sun, either beach or park and devouring loads of tasty food and delicious wine with good people. This is why Sydney Food & Wine Fair always appeals to me so much. Especially because I haven't been able to go to many of the Crave International Sydney Food Festival events, bar the night noodle markets. Although this may have been because tickets to the progressive dinners sold out in hours.

There were cooking demonstrations by Masterchef contestants, some dance lessons by some reality dance show contestants (can you tell that I don’t watch much tv?) and music that surely the older people there would have enjoyed. But that wasn’t why we were there. We were there to drink, eat and lie in the sun digesting. Which we did. And there was plenty of space on the grass to do so.

Tempus Two’s wine was perfect for the mood. I had the fruity Moscato, which made me think it was summer already. We settled down with this and Wildfire’s lamb, peas and cannelloni with goat’s curd and a Thai style salad (from I can’t quite remember where?)

This was followed up by some serious lying in the sun, reading the free Sydney Morning Herald weekend paper and devouring pavlova from Bill’s. The pavlova was a definite highlight, crunchy and chewy with yoghurt and strawberries, so that it wasn’t too rich, and was served in a generous portion. Much larger than most of the other serving sizes, some of which could have been eaten in one mouth full.

Four in Hand’s offering of fish looked great, but we didn’t quite get around to trying it out. Fish being on the list of foods to avoid by my fellow food lover in crime. I did however, manage to sneak Café Sydney’s  trout, orange, beetroot, salmon roe salad past his eye. This was perfectly light and fresh to suit Saturday’s weather. (See image below).

I’ve been dying to try out Lucio’s hatted restaurant and their hot and spicy barbeque wings looked tempting, but we already had a BBQ planned that night. So it will have to wait until another time. Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream (not exactly a hatted restaurant) proved to be extremely popular, due to the strong sun and everyone was in a relaxed chilled out mood. The only suggestion I would have for the event organizers would be regarding the positioning of the coupon sales, as they blocked the pathway. The only negative comments heard all day was about this, because everyone knows that Australian’s don’t like queuing and walking through and potentially squashing plants in parks.

We had a few more glasses of wine and then headed off home to start preparing our BBQ. A great day of food, mild heatstroke, wine and oh did I mention the fab food?