Westeros Wagon

The chance to try free Westerosi cuisine had DS & me scrambling to Tottenham Court Road to try and find the Westeros Wagon. It remained elusive for the first ten minutes, as we stood with other fans, peering round street corners and craning our necks hoping to spot it and checking Facebook and the Twitter-feeds for updates. When we finally realized it was on Chenies Street, we made a sprint for it, only to find a queue about 60 people long.

Most of the people were in the queue to meet Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who plays Bran Stark in the series, but DS and I were really only there for the free food. But like most of the lords and ladies of the series, they weren't all that successful in feeding the many hungry small-folk. 

The wagon, actually a rather spiffed out food truck, had been giving out sticks of wild boar cured sausage with mustard preserved fruits, and small bowls of spiced Medieval porridge in little wooden pots. By the time we arrived, the wagon was out of the sausages, and the porridge got cut off three people before us. 

As it so happened, the organizers stopped giving out food directly from the truck soon after we got there. Instead, we were told to wait around for people to come down the line with snacks for us. This basically involved a person in costume (A sell-sword, or a red priestess) coming down the line with a wicker basket, out of which you could take one piece of pumpkin bread to munch on while you waited to meet Bran Stark. 

As you can see, it was more a dollop than anything, and quite hard as well, since it probably had been cooked fairly early in the day and survived along transport to Central London. But it was surprisingly good still, with a rather intense nutty pumpkin flavour and topped with roasted pumpkin seeds. The website said it was supposed to come with root soup, but it seemed as though they'd run out of that too.

By the time the bread came around, we were five people away from the front of the line, so we stuck around long enough for photos and autographs. DS & I chatted with  Hempstead-Wright for a bit as we all smiled for the cameras, and found him to be polite and quite lovely.

Still though, pity about the lack of food.