Taste & Music Fest

How do you blip a disappointment?

When you hear about something called a "Taste & Music Fest" and you find out that there's an admission charge to begin with and that you need to buy tokens on top of that before you get to actually taste any food – when you hear that, surely it isn't unreasonable to expect that each token will entitle you to an actual tasting, so allowing you to judge a restaurant's fare and decide whether or not you might actually fancy eating there. That was our expectation anyway, but it turned out to be unrealistic. Thankfully, the organisers had seen sense and reduced the admission charge from 12 to 5 euro. If we'd been stuck for the original asking price we would definitely have felt hard done by, as the whole thing was a bit of a disaster.

We spent another 10 euro each on tokens, but these didn't go very far. Rather than adopting a policy of one token equals one tasting, the various stands (just one row of them in a long marquee) had things priced as high as seven or eight tokens, based on one token equating to one euro (all a bit pointless really). To be fair, a couple of the stands agreed with us when we told them it was all a bit of rip-off, but the only one which made any good-will gesture was Fitzpatrick's Killiney Hotel. What we got for our money when we actually decided to cash in our tokens was pretty pathetic, really: a tiny portion on a paper plate or in a paper funnel. Possibly worst of all was the bar. It was four o'clock or so when we went there first, but they'd already run out of Guinness and an hour later they'd also run out of draught cider (which they said they were serving as "pints" but were actually in 400 ml paper cups).

Even the music bit of the Taste & Music was disappointing. It took about an hour for them to get the stage ready for Sonny Condell after whoever had been on before him, and then the sound was wretched, only sorting itself out when his set was almost over. Sonny is a bit of a legend on the Irish music scene, mainly through his involvement with Scullion in the good old days. His gig today wasn't up to much, but at least I got a blip out of it.

We retired to Walters pub afterwards and had a great chat with a taxi-driver customer before moving on to The Cozie a few doors down. The pints made up for the earlier disappointments.