A Warm Welcome To Our New Partners, Fortnum & Mason

Port Eliot welcomes Fortnum & Mason to the best year yet for food at the festival. We are delighted to be able to unveil a new food stage for 2014 and a partnership with Fortnum & Mason featuring the Fountain Restaurant taking over the Orangery and nighttime feasting with Mark Hix. For the first time our famous Flower Show will also feature food and an incredible line up of the country’s best chefs who will show you how to cook.

Since 1707, Fortnum & Mason has been serving fine food from its Piccadilly store. Now it is making its first foray into festival food at Port Eliot. Fortnum’s will be setting up a Cornwall based outpost of its award–winning restaurant, The Fountain, in our beautiful Orangery designed by the festival’s creative director Michael Howells who will work with decorations from the celebrated windows at Fortnum’s Piccadilly store. Open from 8:00am, ‘Fortnum’s Fountain’ will serve an all-day breakfast and brunch with some Fountain favourites including Welsh Rarebit, Scrambling Prawns, Oeufs Drumkilbo (a favourite of the Queen Mother) and the classic Cream Tea.

During the evening, friend of Fortnum’s and chef extraordinaire, Mark Hix takes over the kitchen. For two sittings (the first at 6:30pm aimed at families, and the second at 9:00pm), Hix will be cooking up a range of British classics and a selection of staples from the menu at his hugely successful, Shoreditch restaurant, Tramshed. The bar in the Orangery will serve Fortnum’s Brut Champagne and cocktails, including the ‘Hix Fix’. Reservations for breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner will be taken on the festival website.

The centre for festival food will be the new Flower and Fodder Stage, sponsored for 2014 by Fortnum & Mason in the Quad in front of the house. Heaven for foodies and a haven for chefs, growers, gardeners and food writers, the line up includes Sam and Sam Clark (Moro), Skye Gyngell, Rose Prince, Tom Parker Bowles, The Ethicureans, Russell Norman & Luke Bishop (Polpo), Nathan Outlaw, Hemsley + Hemsley, Thomasina Miers, Mark Diacono (Otter Farm), Richard Bertinet (The Bertinet Kitchen), Daniel de la Falaise, Benjamin Ranyard (Higgledy Garden), Jonathon Jones (Tregothnan), Jason Goodwin (The Pauper’s Cookbook), Zita West, Justine Kanter (The Kitchen Coach).

Over the weekend, the stage will cover many subjects, including the best ways of eating healthily, common culinary mistakes, eating yourself pregnant and how to grow your own food. Aside from offering the chance to taste great food prepared by innovative chefs, the stage will give a detailed insight into the life of a restaurateur, with Russell Norman and Luke Bishop of Venetian restaurant Polpo examining how to start up a restaurant from scratch. In the Big Kitchen, Port Eliot cook Kay Bolitho will show how to make a genuine Cornish pasty and Murphy Williams will create natural, luxury marshmallows.

Elsewhere on site, a giant Fortnum’s iconic wicker hamper will be selling ‘Rare-Bits’ (Fortnum’s famous Welsh Rarebit fingers served in takeaway boxes) and people who like their refreshments to come to them should look out for the roaming Tea Tuk that will dispense Fortnum’s famous teas and coffee.