Noche Cubana - a flawed triumph.
A flawed triumph, a glittering disaster…the UK launch of Slow Music was certainly a night to remember, a magnificent shipwreck of an event which went down giggling with all handsbrandishing empty rum bottles.
The idea was a serious attempt to bring Slow succour to a musical rare breed, the supper club band, by combining a particularly distinctive practitioner with food, drink and surroundings of outstanding compatibility. The nine-piece Cuban band Son del Tropico, in London to play the Barbican, was hi-jacked on its free night and bussed down the M4 to join a specially created Cuban menu by Chris Wicks of Bells Diner and a couple of Bristol’s best cocktail barmen in the promising interior of a nightclub which, in spite of its unpromising name, consisted of a tolerably preserved 1930s cinema. Ticket sales started sluggishly, and Chris planned at first for 50 meals, later increasing this to 90.
Then three hundred and fifty people turned up and all hell broke loose. Chris heroically turned out 120 dishes of delights such as Creole pork with okra, black beans and rice and plantain and parsley tortilla, but could have shifted three times that. The bar, besieged, ran dry. The band was too loud, but the assembled convivialists just pulled back the tables and danced. A handful of people complained, very reasonably, that this was not the soigne affair they’d been led to expect, but far more simply revelled in it. The Telegraph’s food writer left enthusing wildly, and next day the Real Food Lover blog concluded “great music and dancing may be the missing ingredient to Slow Food”.
So we will persist. The Escargophone production staff are even now considering themes for the next Slow Music Night: a cucumber sandwich and the tea dance workshop is current favourite, with death metal and balti a close second.
URGENT! Not To Be Missed Slow Food & Music Event
Stop Press! New Cuban Night Event 29 June! Birth of Slow Music!
Please click on the flyer for the basic facts or here for the juicy details.
We need people to organize groups of friends to reserve if this ambitious and highly promising event is to be as successful as the last ones.
Call Phil Sweeney on 0117 904 1530
or Sue Miller on 07843 037074
Noche Cubana, Monday 29 June
Full Briefing
Welcome to the new Slow Food Bristol website.
Welcome to the new Slow Food Bristol website. It’s taken a while to drag into existence, but we hope you’ll find it worth the wait. Eventually. At present, you’ll notice, it contains a good deal of the old site’s content, but we hope rejuvenation will soon take hold. For this to happen, we need you to contribute: news, opinions, reviews, pictures…so please get in touch with me at phil@slowfoodbristol.org .
Events 2009
News imminently on our next events, which will include a charcuterie workshop and tasting at Papadeli and the launch of member Andrea Leeman’s eagerly awaited book on Gloucestershire Food, at an interesting new venue currently under negotiation.
Meanwhile, our most recent event, on the 26th of May, was our most successful in terms of attendance ever. Fifty-eight people turned out for theglittering Slow Rockfish Grill, among them UK Slow Chair Gerry Danby, who flew down from Yorkshire in Carlo Petrini’s personal Gulfstream for the evening with a bevy of starlets. The dinner marked the opening of the new Whiteladies Road successor to the old Slow favourite Fishworks, and was hosted by Mitch Tonks, chef-proprietor, who welcomed us to his smart new premises, talked about the network of West Country fishermen who supply his two restaurants, signed his new book, and, most importantly, cooked a simple but faultless meal of cuttlefish in ink, roast scallops, char-grilled monkfish, and sea bream en papillote.
Slow Music
What is it, you may well ask. Music which bears similar characteristics to the food championed by the Slow Movement, for one thing, but there might be numerous other factors. Whatever, music has been an increasing preoccupation of the Slow Movement’s Italian theoreticians for some years now, and we in the very musical city of Bristol intend to get in on the act, as it were. News soon. In the meantime, if interested, see two articles on the subject by Phil Sweeney, here & here. [NB these and other articles posted are not so much shameless self-promotion as scraping around for content for this site, which will doubtless soon start to arrive].
Market Award
In February, Bristol Slow Food Market (the UK’s first and the model for the recently introduced Italian Earth Markets) was the winner, along with the Bristol Farmers Market, of a National Association of Market Authorities Speciality Market of the Year Award, the Oscar of the market world.
Event News 2008
After a patchy start, 2008 concluded with two outstandingly successful events.
In October, the Slow Frugal Dinner celebrated the publication of our new member Fiona Beckett’s book The Frugal Cook. A packed Ocean Cafe tucked into a bargain basement menu of treats such as lambs heart casserole, bubble and squeak and fromage trouve, created by Stuart Seth in consultation with Fiona.
In December another animated throng of members and friends met in Quartier Vert for the Slow Food Bristol Christmas Party, combined with the celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary of Barny Haughton’s ground-breaking first restaurant. Unfortunately QV closed down shortly afterwards, but this was less due to the Curse of Slow Food than the economic climate.
Bristol Slow Food was also instrumental in the organization of another extremely successful event in Barny Haughton’s newer restaurant, Bordeaux Quay. This was the national Soil Association Slow Food Dinner, which brought together several hundred delegates from around the country, and a battalion of the West Country’s best food producers. BQ staged a sumptuous buffet of which delights such as Othniel oysters, poached carp with sauce gribiche, Heron Green Farm roast beef with aligot and West Country ice-creams were merely a small selection of high points.
Slow Salone Turin October 2008
A smaller but no less energetic Bristol contingent attended than in 2006. See Phil Sweeney’s report on the event here.
We strongly recommend putting October 2010 in your diaries for the next Piemonte Slow extravaganza.
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