Our passionate commitment to encourage as many restaurants as possible to participate in the London Restaurant Festival in 2010 is now well underway.

We want hundreds of restaurants across the capital to be running their own Festival Menus this year. Ingenious, affordable and nourishing menus that excite regulars and entice new customers.

A founding principle of London Restaurant Festival is supporting the restaurant industry in London and the whole team at LRF will be focusing hard on this in 2010.

Restaurant Pre-Registration Opens Today

The first important news is that the restaurant sign up process has been completely overhauled, and simplified, so you will now be able to swiftly register online.

We are pleased to announce that from today we are opening pre-registration. This opportunity is primarily open to all the restaurants that took part last year and those who register will receive 10% off the sign-up costs as a thank-you for supporting us in year one.

On the subject of cost, we’ve simplified that too. This year we have decided to have one fee for each restaurant and this will be £110 per restaurant.

This means that pre-registered restaurants will pay £99. This offer is open until 30 March.

New Bloggers for 2010

This blog also marks the start of regular blogs from Fay Maschler, myself and the wonderful Penny Watson who is in charge of all the restaurants involved in LRF. There will also be some other guest bloggers in the months ahead.

We will announce our exciting schedule of events in April so if you want to be one of the first to find out what’s going on then do join our mailing list.

Thanks very much for your continued support. Here’s to our second year and to making London Restaurant Festival 2010 the internationally renowned celebration of restaurants that the capital deserves.

Obviously we will keep you fully updated with our plans as we approach March when we aim to officially announce LRF 2010 and reveal some new events and some of the improvements we are instigating.

The team has spent a considerable amount of time listening to the feedback from year one and are working on creating an even more engaging and spirited London Restaurant Festival in its second year.

Many thanks once again to all the chefs who took part in year one, all those who bought tickets to events and also the 10,000 people who sat down to enjoy a festival menu at one of the 500-odd participating restaurants.

For LRF 2010 we hope to bring you an experience that will take London one step closer to hosting the most internationally renowned restaurant festival in the world.

Happy Christmas once again and we’ll be back soon.

London so clearly merits celebration of its restaurants. Hardly a day goes by without hearing news of a new venture in catering  – straight- up or subversive. During the credit crunch, the emphasis happily  has been on crunch in the sense of celery stick,  wood-fired pizza base, falafel, veal Holstein, Peking Duck, an apple, a biscuit, a brandy snap….you get my drift. The London Restaurant Festival lives on  to support and encourage the pleasures of eating out and the importance of sitting down with family, friends and colleagues to share a meal and have a conversation.

Some Festival events such as Eat Film will continue.  A movie followed by  the meal of the plot proved the ideal diverting evening. Gourmet Odysseys which this year took place in the West End will next year see Routemasters heading for Shoreditch, Notting Hill, Chiswick, Islington, Wandsworth and so forth proving that fascinating food has no geographical boundaries.

Chefs are coming to us with ideas for events and gatherings for 2010. 

It was wonderful and gratifying to have the enthusiasm and practical contribution of so many chefs and restaurateurs this year and next year we hope to be able to reward them with more than a smile and a kiss.

Special good-value menus remain at the heart of the Festival and in 2010 we hope even more restaurants will sign up, create irresistible menus and benefit from the extra custom that can be directed their way.

Please stay in touch. All ideas are welcome and all criticism will be carefully considered.

Our host for the evening was the BBC’s Nigel Barden who provided both wit and warmth. Fay Maschler, the distinguished Evening Standard restaurant critic and festival Chair, opened proceedings explaining that the awards were devised to honour the fundamentals of restaurant-going as she saw it. So there was no Best French, Best Italian and so forth but categories that included Bravery, Passion, Ceremony and Fun.

Thanks to our awards presenters Giles Coren, Tom Parker-Bowles, Tracey MacLeod and Nick Jones.
Also thanks to GH Mumm champagne who were the official champagne of the London Restaurant Festival and Ketel One vodka who did cocktails.

You can see all the award winners if you click on the article in today’s London Evening Standard.

Fay was presented with a special award, by GH Mumm, for her outstanding contribution to the industry before I trundled up to give thanks to all of those who have helped the festival be such a tremendous success in year one.
The whole thing lasted no more than 40 minutes which Fay and I were particularly pleased about as there are few things we find more tiresome than lengthy awards ceremonies.

Pizza East Opening and After Party

The awards were held in a rather modish covered, cobbled courtyard that separates Shoreditch House from Pizza East, the latest restaurant from Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, and his business partner Richard Caring.

Nick, who is an old friend of Fay and myself, very kindly offered to open up Pizza East to 160 of our guests for dinner. Given that the place does not open to the public until Friday this was extremely generous of him – and also rather brave given that the room was full of critics, chefs and restaurateurs.

Pizza East, housed in a 5000 sq ft former tea warehouse, straddles the worlds of the City and the Shoreditch funksters and its canny formula of rough-hewn hipness will appeal to both.

We feasted on the most delicious pizza and Francesco Mazzei, whose restaurant L’Anima won an award and who was brought up in Calabria told me he thought the pizza superb and he knows what he’s talking about.

Plate after plate of calamari, lasagne, sea bass and a divine cauliflower carbonara came to the table washed down with tumblers of wine – it’s all about tumblers of wine these days. Thanks so much Nick and good luck when you open on Friday.

All in all a wonderful way to round off the first London Restaurant Festival. However, this does not mean that this website will be going quiet. Oh no.

I’ll keep everyone updated as we start to make plans for the London Restaurant Festival 2010. All the team have achieved an extraordinary amount in year one with very little time or money and we intend to build on that platform.

We’ve learned an enormous amount. There’ll be changes, improvements and some new events so keep checking in.
Thanks everyone for your support and all feedback is vital to us so speak up.

London Restaurant Festival would like to thank everyone who voted for their favourite Festival Menus.

The winners will be announced tonight at the Awards ceremony- stay tuned!

We wanted a cerebral element in The London Restaurant festival and Professor Simon Schama’s inaugural lecture which took place yesterday morning at Kings Place provided that and more.

His talk entitled Mouthing off : Eating and Utterance, which he delivered self- confessedly jet-lagged but fizzing with energy, insight and humour took the  brains of the audience on a whirlwind tour of the language of food. There was a  much appreciated  flattering assumption on the behalf of Professor Schama of a parity of reading and experience.

Several people said to me afterwards that it was so exhilarating to find the opposite of dumbing down. “My mind has been stirred with a big wooden spoon. I’m off home to find and read the books of M.F.K. Fisher”, said a friend of mine as she left.

John Nugent of Green and Fortune, the caterers at Kings Place, laid on a terrific brunch with fruit kebabs and muesli for the health conscious and bacon butties for the rest of us before the talk. And many in the audience went afterwards for lunch to the Rotunda Restaurant on the ground floor overlooking Battlebridge Basin, which was taking part in the Festival’s Big Roast celebration. Having their own farm in Northamptonshire supplying the beef and lamb, they are perfectly poised to produce a great traditional Sunday lunch.

I must confess now that The Wells is owned by my sister Beth Coventry but nepotism sometimes ought to rule.  Tonight The Wells is hosting a Lucky Dice evening – throw a six and your food will be free – and there is still time to try their festival menu at £25 for two courses and send in votes.

Speaking of nepotism, you can also try a Festival Menu and a Lucky Dice extravaganza tonight  at my son Ben’s gastropub, The Draper’s Arms in Islington. Food runs in the family.

Photo gallery:

Photo gallery:

A team of top London chefs just pipped a team of critics to victory on Saturday night at the inaugural Starter For Ten quiz – part of the London Restaurant Festival.

Questions were set by distinguished critic, and London Restaurant Festival chair Fay Maschler, with legendary quizmaster Bamber Gascoigne in charge of proceedings.

Thomasina Miers from Wahaca, Richard Corrigan, Rowley Leigh from Le Cafe Anglais and Jeremy Lee from the Blueprint Cafe were on the chef team against Giles Coren, Toby Young, Matthew Norman and Tracey MacLeod were the critics. Simon Parkes of the Food Programme of Radio Four was the voiceover man.

There were drinks beforehand – kindly donated by our sponsors Field, Morris & Verdin – and the quiz had picture rounds, music rounds, proper buzzers and the whole works. It was all very professional and the questions were deliciously tricky.

Well done to the chefs and good effort from the critics – better luck next year.