The Festival makes a great day out with food markets, cookery workshops, tastings and dinners. Events begin early-morning and continue through the day with daily wine tastings, Slow Food workshops, drinks at the new Evening Fountain Café leading on to Festival dinners in the Guildhall and Mansion House.

Here are some of the Festival highlights:

Shopping: Parliament Street and St Sampson’s Square will be filled for the duration with market stalls offering food to buy and food to eat in the street. Shop for Yorkshire cheeses, wild boar sausages, organic vegetables, sticky toffee pudding to eat with Yorkshire clotted cream. From hog roasts to paella there will be plenty of street food. Restaurants too will take to the street with dishes from Loch Fyne, Hotel du Vin and the award winning Thai restaurant Sukhothai in Leeds.

Cooking: The region’s top chefs will be out in force: Andrew Pern from the Star at Harome, Paul Heathcote from the Olive Press in Leeds, Stephanie Moon from Rudding Park, the Festival Director Michael Hjort from Melton’s. You can also see Rachel Green from Yorkshire TV’s ‘The Flying Cook’ and Rob Green from Green’s of Whitby

Besides daily demonstrations in the Cookery Theatre in Parliament Street, there will also be hands-on cookery workshops for adults and children in the Guildhall

Eating: Naturally there will be plenty to eat at the Festival. At workshops, market stalls and the Evening Fountain Café – a marquee in Parliament Street – offering beer, wine, music and food including Ghanaian curry and a Yorkshire hog roast from Scott’s of York.

In the evening there will be Festival dinners: A Victorian dinner in the Mansion House; a curry cooked by York’s own Gurkha regiment; the York Dinner with food sourced entirely from within the city walls and a sumptuous Yorkshire Sommelier and St Emilion wine tasting and dinner in the Guildhall.

An irreverent YorkshireVision Sausage Contest promises good fun. Vote for your favourite sausage in a Eurovision-style competition to find Yorkshire’s best sausage followed later in the week by the YorkshireVision Cheese Contest and the YorkshireVision Pudding Contest.

Drinking: Among a wide ranging wine programme, there will be a tutored wine tasting every afternoon as well as the ever-popular Ale Trail.

Information and Ticket line now open: 01904 466687

www.yorkfoodfestival.com