Food at the Electric Picnic

So I’m back from the Electric Picnic, and have got most of the mud off my boots, the feeling has come back into my feet and I think the rum has finally left my system.  What a great weekend!  One of the draws of the Picnic is of course the many interesting food stands that are set up there.  You can eat extremely well at the Picnic, while paying well over the odds of course. It’s a kind of festival tax – everything costs at least €2 more than it should. And there are of course many food stands that serve dreadful muck, hoping that people will be too wrecked or tipsy to complain.

There’s a few food stands that are so well thought of that they become a feature of the festival themselves. And then when that happens, multiple inferior versions appear to pick up some of the overspill from the popular places.

One example of the former is Pie Minister, which has a prime pitch near the main arena. I got my hangover lunch there on Sunday afternoon, and boy oh boy, it was excellent.  €11 for a chicken and mushroom pie with mash, gravy and peas.  Everything was perfect quality – crisp buttery pastry, smooth creamy mash.  Even the mushy peas, a foodstuff I normally avoid like the plague (I didn’t realise they’d been added till it was too late), were delicious – delicately flavoured with mint. It was an excellent lunch, and while €11 might seem like a lot for pie and mash, it was very rich and I wasn’t able to finish it.

There’s a Pie Minister clone called Pie Face that I tried on the Friday.  They have all the surface trappings – groovy van, quirky little illustrations on the menu, ‘free range’ and ‘organic’ plastered all over everything. Unfortunately their pies were terrible.  I got charged €10 for a pie and chips: the chips were fine but the pie was like something you’d get to microwave yourself in a service station.  Poor show, Pie Face.

Other notable food stuff – thinking that €3.50 was a very reasonable price for a toasted sandwich, but then being charged €3 for a cup of tea at the same stand.  The most ridiculous overcharging I saw was a plate of cheesy salsa cajun fries (no meat included) for €9.  I had a very tasty breakfast sandwich from the Rathmullen House stand which was only €5, a veritable bargain by Electric Picnic standards.

What did you eat at the Electric Picnic?  Did you find yourself paying €9 for chips?