Essex Festival of Food & Drink

Welcome to the second year of the Essex Festival of Food and Drink where we will be celebrating the quality, variety and abundance of food and drink local to our region.

Buoyed by the positive reactions, success and thousands of visitors in 2011, this year's festival is an even more ambitious affair with a weekend full of fabulous food and drink related events, top chef demonstrations, pastry and bread making, cake baking competitions, wine tastings and butchery demonstrations.

Add to this, the very best of local producers along with a touch of some British and overseas delicacies and there will be a wonderful selection to tempt your taste buds.

The popular 500 seater Food Court will be back again with over 20 different food and drink vendors serving freshly cooked food such as Indian street food, local seafood, and hog roast, all washed down with your favourite tipple. There will also be live music to create a lively festival atmosphere.

We have three fabulous celebrity chefs demonstrating their culinary expertise in the cookery theatre over the weekend alongside our very own top Essex chefs.

Aldo Zilli:
Appearing Saturday 21st July

Aldo is an award winning celebrity chef and restaurateur who specialises in Italian and seafood cuisine. Great food and Aldo's exuberant personality means Aldo appears regularly on radio and TV both as a presenter and chef.

Gino D'Acampo:
Appearing Sunday 22nd July

In 2009 Gino scored a spectacular success winning the title "King of the Jungle" on ITV's hit series, "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here". Viewers took him to their hearts voting him the winner by a huge margin.

Gino is a regular on our TV screens in programmes such as "Let’s Do Lunch with Gino & Mel", "This Morning" and "There’s No Taste Like Home".

Mark Baumann:
Mark is an acclaimed British Master Chef.

Following his training in Michelin starred restaurants in both France and the UK he was discovered by Britains greatest restaurateur Peter Langan to open a restaurant in Essex.

25 years later Baumanns Brasserie in Coggeshall, Essex continues to flourish and is described by the independent newspaper as a local legend and is listed by the Times newspaper as a uk top ten Brasserie.

Tickets will be on sale from March 2012.

Ticket Prices include:
Free Parking
Event Programme
Entrance to ALL areas of the festival including celebrity chef demonstrations.
(Seating in the cookery theatre will be allocated on a first come first served basis. There will be standing room available.)

Children under 12 years are free.

Car parking is free.

Sorry, no pets allowed into the event except for guide dogs.

Cressing Temple takes its unusual name from the medieval monks of the Knights Templar who founded the two vast wooden barns, which form the centrepiece of this delightful rural estate.

Nestled to one side of the barns is the Walled Garden. Inspired by an age when gardens combined beauty and functionality, it is the result of painstaking research and archaeological excavation, and is filled with species widely cultivated at the time.

As you step within the Tudor walls, you step back in time. Here plants have been carefully grouped according to medicinal, culinary and dyers' plants, a potager and a small orchard and nuttery. The nosegay garden is a fragrant delight with a wealth of sweetly scented plants that were grown for their perfume, whilst the arbour is planted to recall Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream with its profusion of roses, woodbine and oxlips. more

Cressing Temple Barns Details (including directions)Show Location Map

Click the button below to book your tickets for Essex Festival of Food & Drink at Cressing Temple Barns, Braintree & Great Dunmow.