"If food is a symbol of love, let's all eat" says Rupert Whitaker

Alan D Wolfelt famously said “food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate.”

I started my pop-up restaurant as an act purely from the heart.

Cooking and feeding people has always been a passion of mine, and I wanted an operation I could run where I could put my love for food on a plate. It has therefore come as a pleasant surprise getting involved with catering for people’s weddings.

This was never my first ambition for The Field Kitchen. It is very much a pop-up restaurant – providing a gourmet, mostly outdoor eating experience for any member of the public who would like to attend.

But the mix of bric-a-brac French linens, tables and vintage glassware with the wild flowers picked from the garden sitting in old mustard pots on the table got the romance brewing.

Customers were popping into the back of my catering van to ask if I would consider providing them with a delicious menu for one of the most important meals of their lives. No pressure then!

Recently I’ve met a lot of couples and indeed their respective potential in-laws who are genuinely tired of the expensive marquees, with golden chairs and what they see as ‘cardboard’ food offerings. There seems to me a move to the more do-it-yourself wedding still nodding to the traditional wedding breakfast. Plus sharing plates seem to be going down a storm at the moment.

It’s quite an ice-breaker when you have a table of people who may not know each other carving and serving up the main course to themselves. For instance a slow cooked leg of lamb, marinated for 24 hours in lemon zest and yoghurt served with a Lebanese fattoush salad and flat breads seasoned with cumin and black onion seeds.

What’s exciting about Oxfordshire is that there’s ample opportunity to find an old barn, field or even the odd cricket pavilion to have your own bespoke event.

And now there are plenty of companies that can provide mobile catering like myself plus pizza trucks, crepe vans and even churros on hand for later in the evening. There are now companies that can put up affordable alternatives for wet weather – with tepees, yurts and the like.

So now people have so much choice I don’t think it will be long before we will see a change in the overall wedding catering business mentality.

This summer I’m looking for a new venue to do my regular summer outdoor restaurant pop-ups so if anyone has any ideas I’m all ears.

In the meantime my wife Vicky is assembling together a TV pilot for a documentary on me and my restaurant and the whole pop-up movement.

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