The Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food & Wine is back

AT 9.30am on a glorious Saturday last year, I paused at the entrance to the Ballymaloe Grainstore; was I really going to pass up a rare blast of Irish summer sunshine to instead sit indoors and listen to two guys talking?

Fair enough, it was an intriguing prospect, a public interview with Claus Meyer, co-founder of Noma, then ‘the world’s greatest restaurant’ for three years running, but on such a glorious day, I was struggling to see the attraction.

Two hours later, I stumbled blinking into the sunlight, exhilarated by Meyer’s fascinating, inspiring, and often riotously funny talk and knew right then there was no place I would rather be — and thus began the world’s very first literary festival solely devoted to food and drink. The secpond Kerrygold Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food & Wine takes place next month in the grounds of Ballymaloe House, in East Cork.