Welcome to the HFF Blog

Welcome to the Henley Food Festival Blog, we'll be updating on a fairly regular basis, especially once we start getting really active in the New Year.

There are lots of things bubbling under at the moment that the whole team is very excited about, but until that pen signs the proverbial dotted line we can't tell you more. So watch this space!

Having said that we are really pleased that Phyllis Court Club will be letting us use their Paddock again and provided we can iron out some access problems, we should be able to improve the whole site for 2010. Thanks must also go to Signals http://www.signals.co.uk/, the best web and design company in town, for all their brilliant work on our website.

We have just been able to put up some fantastic film footage of the 2009 Henley Food Festival on YouTube courtesy of RT Films and CoolcucumberTV, http://www.youtube.com/henleyfoodfestival with the RT Films footage also embedded at the foot of the HFF home page; dont worry it's not all in Italian!

This blog also gives us the opportunity to talk about food in and around Henley more generally and to find out from our visitors what they would like to see at the Festival and how they would like to see the Henely food scene improve.

For example I am always disappointed by the large number of chain restaurants there are in the town itself, and especially by the mediocre quality of the food served. Today's lunch in Brasserie Gerard is a case in point; great service, nice setting but completely flavourless French onion soup, goujons and escalope. Cheap but actually I can do much better at home.

It made me think that what the town could do with is a good independent brasserie. We have Italian's but no French. In a town this size and this affluent that's quite a suprise. Neither do we have modern British/European. While around Henley, in many of the villages, former pubs are serving great food, yet there is nothing in the town that comes close.

What does anyone else think, leave a comment and maybe we can get a campaign going. In the meantime we'd be interested to hear who your favourite local restaurant and food supplier or producer is.