Homemade glazed buns for Bar Boulud's Tunisienne hot dogs

Pascal Aussignac peddles his Marmite Royale, winner of festival's Best Taste award

If you wish to give this year’s Taste of London restaurant festival a miss rather than pay £24 for the right to pay top £ for small plates of food you eat standing up that’s your business. Sorry, complaints about the high admission price are now so old and tired the first ones were texted on Nokia 1100s.

This post is about what not to miss if you’re not missing Taste. The remaining sessions are this afternoon, tonight and tomorrow after.

I’m very pleased that Club Gascon’s Marmite Royale won the Best in Taste award. I hosted the world preview, if not premiere, of Pascal Aussignac’s invention at my June 11th BurgerMonday pop-up at Comptoir Gascon (photos).

Full disclosure: My four festival recommendations below are based on a limited sampling. Forget Hoovers: I’d have needed a Flymo Turbo 400 to graze all of muddy Regent’s Park.

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But in the consummate coddling of those eggs I saw only opportunity. Here, at last, was the chance to test an eggsistential hypothesis with a giant of French gastronomy.

Greeting Passard in the kitchen of the Vila Joya at the International Gourmet Festival in Algave, Portugal, I asked the chef at three-Michelin -starred L’Arpège in Paris to imagine a world in which a single egg sold not for 20 cents but for 20 euros. Wouldn’t the humble chicken egg then join truffles, caviar and foie gras amongst our most prized food luxuries?

“I agree with you,” said Passard. “The egg is so valuable in so many ways. It is the treasure of pastry. If the egg didn’t exist…”

The chef paused, took a deep breath:

“Why that’s unthinkable!”