Saudi Gazette report

RIYADH — The Saudi Culinary Arts Commission will organize the second edition of the Saudi Feast Food Festival in Riyadh on Tuesday.

The festival, which runs until Dec. 29, showcases Saudi Arabia’s rich food heritage and creates authentic experiences for visitors. It offers a wide variety of Saudi dishes, featuring cultural and heritage connotations.

Saudi chefs will display their unique products by demonstrating their creativity and skills and disseminating educational and entertaining content to all segments of society.

The festival offers diverse food entertainment avenues to explore new flavors, cooking competitions, discussing project opportunities available to international partners with locals, exporting distinctive ideas from the Kingdom to the world, and introducing the culture and history of the Kingdom and the Middle East region through food.

A wide variety of activities and events will be staged in different locations, and this includes an area dedicated to the art of cooking heritage in the Kingdom so as to enable visitors to taste the famous ingredients and recipes of each region of the Kingdom through interactive experiences and merging them with live shows.

The performance area of the festival will witness cooking competitions and events that will be held on a stage specially prepared for it.

There will be children and interactive farm areas that will enable them to prepare simple dishes under the supervision of specialists using local products and ingredients on a real farm where crops grow so as to enable them to see how the entire food system works.

Another feature of the zone is an educational demonstration area where workshops will be held discussing various topics in the field of culinary arts.

At the same time, the Business Zone will shed light on the opportunities and modern trends in the sector by holding discourse sessions led by specialists from around the world and international companies, to create opportunities that support the food sector in the Kingdom.

The festival includes a gift shop area, a cookbook sale area, and a souk to buy local food products.

The restaurant zone will be the largest among the festival zones and will include restaurants and food carts that offer more than 200 food concepts, in addition to boutiques selling cookery books, and a souk selling various products with the identity of the festival.