The Crave Sydney International Food Festival, presented by Citibank, will be Sydney’s most exciting food month ever.

Kicking off with our Barbecue Madness launch weekend (October 2), October 2010 will be a month-long feast of extraordinary food-themed events, from the finest fine dining at the city’s leading restaurants to the buzzy hawker-style Night Noodle Markets in Hyde Park (October 11 – 22).

For a truly global perspective, the don’t-miss World Chef Showcase at Star City (October 8 – 10) is all about the big names and the big trends.

The Showcase themes reflect the culinary zeitgeist: an increasing concern about where our produce comes from and how it is grown; the fascinating flavours of the Middle East and Turkey; and of course, the latest in kitchen wizardry from the avant-garde chef set.

We can’t wait to see New York’s Wylie Dufresne (wd~50) showing off his extraordinary, original, techno-based cooking, nor the marvellous Margaret Xu Yuan from Hong Kong’s Kitchen Yin Yang, with her field-to-plate approach to ingredients and cooking. We’ll learn all about extraordinary village traditions in Turkey from Musa Dagdeviren of the famed Ciya restaurants in Istanbul, meet the coolest up-and-coming chef in France - Alexandre Gauthier - and find out why dessert chefs are the new restaurant rock stars.

The full Crave Sydney International Food Festival program will appear in The Sydney Morning Herald in September.

We look forward to seeing you at the Festival in October!

Joanna Savill     
Festival Director