Judging the annual Electric Picnic food awards is just about the most fun thing we do all year. It is, however, also the most difficult thing we do all year. How can you decide, for instance, that Totally Tipperary with its incredible Country Choice breakfast rolls, amazing Traas Farm Apple Juice and Alan Andrew’s brilliant Coffee Culture brews is not actually going to get one of the gongs, even though every single detail of the operation is perfect.
When everyone is telling you that the cooking in Rathmullan House is some of the best food they have ever enjoyed anywhere, never mind in a field in County Laois, then surely they are a shoe-in for a Best In Ireland Award.
So, yes, it’s incredibly pleasurable, and effectively impossible. What happens then is it forces us to look for those who are bringing something completely new to the Picnic, and, at the same time, we are looking to reward the Picnic stalwarts who have fed everybody well in Stradbally for a decade now. With those things in mind, we think the 2013 winners are classics of the genre. The Judges Award this year went to Kinara Kitchen, run by Sean Collander and Shoaib Yunus.
It wasn’t just the stunning food from Kinara that blew everyone away, but also the wonderful theatricality and the blazing shock of colour that their stall brought to the Picnic, making Naan bread in a tandoor in a field in County Laois is a pretty awesome thing to do.
The Picnicers’ Award is an Award chosen by the people who are partying and eating on the ground. Last year it was won by Saba, who pipped the likes of Pieminister and Flaming Cactus.
This year the top four contenders were Pizza Base from Bantry, Pieminister from the UK, Totally Tipperary, and, the eventually winner, Wok’n’Roll from Dublin. When we told Jim Ryan that he had got the people’s vote, his smile illuminated a Stradbally Saturday.
