Michelin star Adam Handling leads Truro Food Festival return

Lemon Quay is about to smell of woodsmoke for five days straight. Truro Food Festival returns this month with its biggest chef line-up yet, a rebuilt home for its live cooking demonstrations, and a run of ticketed evening feasts that didn’t exist last year.

Running from Wednesday 23 to Sunday 27 September, the festival brings more than 30 chefs, independent producers, street food traders, bars and live music into the centre of the city, with the daytime programme free to attend throughout.

Topping the bill is Michelin-starred chef Adam Handling MBE, appearing at Truro Food Festival for the first time. He’s joined in the Chef’s Theatre by Kate Attlee of Sabzi, Nisha Parmar, Ayesha Kalaji of Queen of Cups, Stephane Delourme, Ben Prior of Porthminster Beach Café, Charlie Walters of Narla, Andi Tuck of The Tartan Fox and Adam Kesakoff of The Aussie Smoker, alongside a wider cast of chefs from Cornwall and further afield.

📷Credit: Jason Alfred Palmer

A new home for the Chef’s Theatre

The festival’s Chef’s Theatre has moved into two linked tipis on Lemon Quay, built around a purpose-made demonstration kitchen. The idea is to put the audience closer to the pans, the fire and the chefs themselves, across five days of demonstrations that cover an enormous range of cooking styles.

Every daytime demonstration is free.

Big Green Egg returns as a festival partner for 2026, bringing live-fire cooking into both the daytime programme and the new evening feasts, chasing the atmosphere of cooking and eating outdoors, fire, smoke and people gathered round it, and setting it down in the middle of Truro.

📷Credit: Stewart Girvan

New for 2026: Chef’s Table Feasts

Once the daytime demonstrations wrap up, the same tipi turns into something else entirely. Just 30 guests a night will sit down to a welcome drink and a three-course feast, with three completely different evenings running across the back half of the festival.

Thursday 24 September brings Bango Kitchen and a Pan-Asian feast built around sushi, Korean BBQ and live-fire cooking. Friday 25 September pairs Nisha Parmar with Cornwall’s Woodfired Canteen for a night built on Nisha’s Indian-inspired cooking, fire and sharing plates. Saturday 26 September closes the series with New Zealand-born Māori chef Matthew Burgess, known as matblak, working again with Woodfired Canteen for an evening rooted in Māori food culture, fire cooking and storytelling at the table.

Tickets are £85 per person, covering the welcome drink and the three courses, and each evening is booked separately from the main festival.

📷Credit: Stewart Girvan

Cornwall at the heart of the festival

For all the visiting names, the festival’s Producer Village keeps Lemon Quay filled with Cornwall’s independent producers, growers and makers, a chance to meet the people behind the stalls rather than just what’s on them.

A Street Food area runs across all five days with flavours from Cornwall and beyond, and live music provides the backdrop throughout.

For 2026, the Live Music Stage and Street Food area are supported by The Buttermarket in Redruth, part of Redruth Revival CIC. The restored Grade II listed market building is home to Cornwall’s first food hall, bringing together six independent kitchens, a bar, live music, markets and events, and giving independent food businesses room to grow. It’s a partnership built on the same aim as the festival itself, backing Cornwall’s independent food businesses on Lemon Quay and beyond it.

📷Credit: Stewart Girvan

A festival bar of its own

Truro Food Festival is running its own bar for the first time in 2026, setting up a dedicated Festival Bar on Lemon Quay with drinks partners including St Ives Brewery, Budvar and Navas Drinks. The rest of the drinks line-up, a mix of local and visiting names, will be confirmed at the festival itself.

Live music and entertainment run alongside the food and drink programme throughout, giving people a reason to find a table and stay a while.

Get involved

Beyond watching and eating, visitors can get hands-on through an expanded programme of workshops developed with Truro School Cookery School. The smaller, bookable sessions let people learn directly from chefs, producers and food specialists, picking up skills, ingredients and techniques along the way.

The full workshop programme, the complete Chef’s Theatre line-up and booking details are all on the festival’s own website.

Five days celebrating food, and the people behind it

Festival organiser Stewart Girvan said the aim was for the event to feel like a genuine celebration of Cornwall’s food and hospitality scene, “while bringing some brilliant friends and chefs from further afield into the city too.”

“This year’s Chef’s Theatre is going to completely change the feel of the festival,” he said. “We’ve created a proper home for live cooking during the day, and then in the evenings that same space becomes somewhere really intimate for our new Chef’s Table Feasts.”

“The thing I’m most excited about is the variety. You can come into Truro, watch some incredible chefs for free, discover a Cornish producer you’ve never met before, grab some street food, listen to live music or book yourself into a workshop or feast.”

Truro Food Festival runs on Lemon Quay from Wednesday 23 to Sunday 27 September. The daytime festival and all Chef’s Theatre demonstrations are free, with selected workshops, Chef’s Table Feasts and special events ticketed separately. Full details, including the complete chef line-up, are at trurofoodfestival.co.uk.

Doors open at 9am each day, running to 5pm Wednesday and Thursday, 7pm Friday and Saturday, and closing at 4pm on the Sunday.

📷Credit: Stewart Girvan