Calling All Food Nerds! Bangalore Hosts a A First-of-its-Kind Festival
Goya Media x Edible Issues launches a festival dedicated to changing the conversation around food. Amrita Amesur peeks behind the scenes to learn more about this convention of gourmands.
How do you get your first 1000 customers? How do you cure meat? How can you pair cheese and chocolate? How do you build a nose for spices? How can you build a people-centric brand?
You can learn all this at more at the Food Nerd Festival, a first-of-its-kind festival, being held in Bengaluru this weekend. The two-day festival is the creation of food media house Goya Media, and food and design collective Edible Issues. Stating its larger vision as “a seat at the table for every player in the food and alco-bev industry,” the festival will be a convention of people from India’s complex food ecosystem coming together to share food, stories and strategies in the business. Think the coolest contemporary Indian chefs cooking up meals, crafting cocktails and sharing insights on the business of food.
This festival has been a dream for both Goya & Edible Issues since 2019. In 2021, they threw the first Food Nerd Party, a post-pandemic Christmas party, as a way to meet and say thank you to the people they had worked with through the year. “2022 was bigger, more exciting, and the party became a space where knowledge-sharing happened organically, ideas blossomed, plans for collaborations and future projects were made. It seemed like a lot of magic was happening. This year, we decided to create a space dedicated to this magic unfolding — the Food Nerd Festival,” says Anisha Oommen, co-founder, Goya Media.
The festival — a playground as it were, for gourmands of all kinds — will take place across the three floors of The Courtyard Community and The Conservatory with sessions and workshops by experts ranging from food entrepreneurs, farmers, chefs, writers, editors and the food-curious.
The festival will take place in different sections. The Food Nerd Playground has chefs and food business founders responsible for putting Indian cuisine on the map coming together on sessions like ‘Innovating on product and growth’, ‘How to get your first 1000 customers’, and ‘How to build a people-centric brand’.
“The world of food today is so vast and full of innovation and I think the Food Nerd Festival is the perfect coming together for food enthusiasts,” says Pooja Dhingra, pastry chef at Le 15 Patisserie. She will be in a session with Thomas Zacharias, former chef of The Bombay Canteen and the founder of Locavore, and illustrator Alicia Souza talking about the process of building a business around their personal brand.
The Playground is ticketed on Zomato Live, Zomato’s new ticketing platform for events, who are partnering with Goya & Edible Issues on this section of the festival. Rishab Khosla of Freedom Tree Design Store, who considers himself a food nerd at heart, has come on as the design and decor partner at the event, in anticipation of “gathering leading culinary and business minds in food in India”.
On the second floor, at The Conservatory, will be Food Nerd Labs: workshops themed Salt, Fat, Heat and Acid. “This is something that is close to my heart as a chef. I have been studying and experimenting with salt for 15 years. To me, salt is the oldest and most used form of preservation known to mankind. It is one of my passions to talk about this,” says chef Gautam Krishnakutty, who is part of a session on curing and pickling meat. Diaspora Co’s Sana Javeri Kadri will conduct a chilli tasting, and spice appreciation workshop. There’s cheese and chocolate tasting with Mansi Jasani of The Cheese Collective. Some of the workshops will be complemented by tasting flights from Godawan Single Malt, and Baileys Irish Cream.
Through the day, visitors can head to the Food Nerd Market to snack on artisanal sandwiches crafted by Loafer & Co, Käse Cheese, Umami Brew kombucha, Soklet chocolate and dosas from Malgudi Mylari Mane. Cyriac Thomas, the founder of Umami Brews, signed on early, and calls the festival “the most important event in my 2023 calender”.
The festival has also created a lot of excitement online for its distinctive design language that blends vintage pop and surrealism. Rohita Madappa of Two Tigers & Co, the festival’s branding and strategy partner was inspired by retro-pop and its distinctive colour palatte. “Goya and Edible Issues have been doing great work in the space of food and we saw that there was immense potential to have their work reach more people. We wanted to develop the Food Nerd Festival into a distinctive IP with a strong brand association and recall. Our strategy has been to use tongue-in-cheek copy, collaborations and design language to make the spaces around food collaborative and interactive like they should be. All our communications online and on ground have been conversation starters..
Butterfingers, a young pop-up by Taiyaba Ali x Maki Patisserie, that has already gained a loyal following in the city, will be curating a special lunch for the festival speakers, with martinis by Tanqueray London Dry.
To close out the day of panels, workshops and toolkits, is After Hours with the Food Nerds, where people can network and unwind over curated cocktails from Godawan Single Malt, Talisker, a hot chocolate bar by Baileys, with food by chef Tresa Francis and Karan Thakker. Headlining After Hours is the first-time-ever collaboration between Lavonne’s Vinesh Johny and Le 15’s Pooja Dhingra, with a curated menu that celebrates the Christmas season.
The highlight of Food Nerd After Hours is a unique collaboratin between Le 15’s Pooja Dhingra and Lavonne’s Vinesh Johny.
The Food Nerd Festival is perfect for anyone who wants to hang out with food writers, home cooks, food industry leaders and others linked to the culinary system — to exchange ideas, provoke discourse and learn. “I consider myself to be a food nerd. The idea of so many people converging at one place and geeking out on different parts of the food system is exciting…like I have found my own tribe,” says Zacharias. “I’m excited to geek out about food.”
Are you? More details on the festival and line-up here: https://www.foodnerdfestival.com/
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