A Gastro Tour of Borough Market

Last Friday afternoon I took the tube from work to London Bridge to take a ‘Gastro Tour’ of London’s famous Borough Market. The tour had been arranged by Walid from Trusted Places and was led by Celia Brooks Brown, who runs these tours on a regular basis. Walid had kindly invited me along with several other food bloggers and a few food journalists from The Guardian and Waitrose Illustrated. I’d never met another food blogger before and it was wonderful to meet like minded people, as passionate about food as I am, who I’d talked to via email and through comments on our blogs but never met.

The tour itself started with a history of the market and then we were led around it, meeting various stall holders and tasting fabulous wares as we went. We got to try wheat grass – one small shot of which contains the same amount of vitamins as a week’s worth of fruit and veg – the amazing parmesan cheese from The Parmesan Cheese Company – the owners of which had made it their lifetime’s work to find the very best parmesan cheese to sell right here in London – the sweetest white balsamic vinegar and the extraodinary (and perhaps not to everybody’s taste) truffle honey. We also got to hold an ostridge egg (did you know one egg feeds 5-6 people? That’s a big omelette.), taste wines from Bedales (hot tip coming up: chilled reds are going to be big this Summer) and eat scallops cooked for us at the Shellseekers stall.

The tour was nicely rounded up with a glass of chilled white wine and oysters at Roast restaurant, which offers food from the very market it overlooks.