Melbourne Tomato Festival

‘Sauce day’ is a sacred annual event for Italians, where members of the family meet to create their unique blend of passata. Utilising traditional techniques passed down generation to generation, each bottle of sugo sauce not only contains ripe, velvety tomatoes and fresh basil, but tradition. Each family prides themselves on their own recipe, and consider their year’s worth of bottled tomato sauce an expression of their identity and their heritage.

The Melbourne Tomato Festival calls for all Looking for Alibrandi fans to partake in ‘sauce day’. Set up at the All Nations Park in Northcote on Sunday, 19 March, the Tomato Festival celebrates suburban garage sauce making and invites the wider community to attend their cultural event. Now you can get in all the action: there are two tonnes of juicy tomatoes ready for the masses to crush, bottle — and eventually — consume in a lovely pasta dish. Amatriciana pasta, anyone?

Now in its third year, the Melbourne Tomato Festival has evolved from the nostalgic childhood memory of the Grossi family and is now an ever-growing social event. This year you can expect to see cooking demonstrations by Guy Grossi and Karen Martini — Australian chef, restaurateur and writer — and an extensive farmers market to purchase only the finest, locally sourced ingredients to accompany your passata.

Treat yourself to some of the best Italian street food on offer from the likes of Woodstock, That’s Amore and Westgarth hot spot, Bar Nonno. Bar Idda will also be in attendance providing delicious morsels of Sicilian-inspired eats.

The great thing about the Melbourne Tomato Festival is that the event is designed to be inclusive in hopes of passing down nonna’s wooden spoon to a new generation of tomato-sauce-making enthusiasts. See you there!

Melbourne Tomato Festival 
All Nations Park, Separation Street, Northcote
Sunday, 19 March, 10am—6pm
melbournetomatofestival.com