Delhi foodies have found a new fad - alfresco food festivals

Delhi foodies have found a new fad — alfresco food festivals.

The latest one, called 'The Grub Fest', was a three-day gala at the Nehru Stadium that brought together home-grown favourites like Karims, Khan Chacha and United Coffee House with newer, multi-cuisine entrants such as Ploof, Fio, Town Hall, En and Saraya and absolute newbies like Ghaas Foos, a vegetarian, fusion, home-catering service. The crowds, in a holiday mood because of the extended Good Friday-Easter weekend in early April, walked in in droves, despite the unseasonal rains. Footfalls, says Mani Singh Cheema, one of the organisers, were just under a lakh.

Events like Grub Fest follow a globally successful format — pop-up food stalls by leading restaurants in an open-air setting with celebrity chefs in attendance to interact with foodies, stalls selling gourmet food items, a few live music and other acts. The best known of these, such as San Francisco Street Food Festival, Taste London and Singapore's World Gourmet Summit, have become magnets for tourism.

In Delhi, the trend was set off by 'Palate Fest' which was held in November at the verdant greens of Nehru Park. The response, says Aditi Kapoor, its young co-promoter, "was unprecedented. We had estimated that around 20,000 people would come. Instead, we got footfalls of 100,000." This success led them to organise a similar, shorter version called Palate Mini in mid-March. That too was a success with 40-45,000 people walking in daily.

But if food festivals are a hit in the capital, in Mumbai, they don't seem to be a success, going by the thin crowds at 'Taste of Mumbai', organised by food entrepreneur Karen Anand and two others at Grant Medical College Grounds on Marine Drive in 2013. No wonder, it hasn't been held since. "Such events are not commercially viable unless they are supported by the government as Palate was. They are also a logistical nightmare," says Anand, who now organises Farmers Markets, which are smaller versions of these food fests.

Perhaps, it was the fact that while Palate was a free event, and Grub Fest had an affordable Rs 100 entry fee, Taste of Mumbai charged a hefty Rs 600 for entrance, though that was offset with the moderate (relatively speaking) pricing of the fare from some of the city's high-end 5-star eateries like Arola from JW Marriott and China House from the Grand Hyatt. Perhaps, it is, as Cheema says, a problem of location. "In Mumbai, you have be very careful about where you do it. If you hold something in town (south Mumbai), you leave out people from the suburbs."

Hopefully, Cheema and his partners will have better success when they take Grub Fest to Mumbai later this year at the Race Course.