Popular Northampton street food event to return as drive-thru next weekend with plans for outdoor events by mid-April

A popular street food event will return as a drive-thru in Northampton next week.

BiteStreet had been operating a drive-thru system at The County Ground, Wantage Road, at the end of last year whereby customers booked in their cars and food was delivered to their vehicles.

Although drive-thrus were allowed to continue when the third national lockdown was introduced in January, organisers felt it was not right to continue.

As the national roadmap out of lockdown has now been laid out, the team behind the highly sought after event is ready to resume the drive-thru event next Friday and Saturday (March 12 and 13) with plans in place to hopefully resume full, outside events in mid-April.

Boss of the event, Crispin Slee, said: “We were allowed to continue in January but we didn’t feel like it was the right thing with the NHS in the eye of the storm.

“Now that the national situation has changed with the vaccine roll out and with the numbers coming down, we have decided that it’s appropriate to give people a bright spot to look forward to in March.

“We have had the event OK-ed by the local Environmental Health officer and hopefully the situation will continue to improve too.”

The event will be ‘lockdown compliant and Covid safe’, according to Crispin, as food from each vendor will be delivered to customers’ cars after being ordered via an app.

He also says the first event next weekend will see the return of six of the event's ‘favourite vendors’.

Traders for the welcome back weekend include rib specialist ‘Broke ‘n’ Bone’, ‘Bare Bones Pizza’, ‘Good Times Cafe UK’ with gourmet griddled cheese toasties, pan-Asian street food from 'Canoodle' and Egyptian flavours from 'Cleopatra’s Kitchen', as well as Northampton favourite 'The Smoke Pit'.

Crispin added: “The event will be held every two weeks, so there will be another drive-thru at the end of March.

“We then have plans to have an outdoor event on the weekend of April 16 and 17 at The County Ground where we will hopefully serve beer as well as food.

“Hopefully these events will continue through April and May.

“We hope the demand is there. We’ve had a grim couple of months, but the days are getting a bit lighter so we hope this can be a bright spot for people to look forward to.”

The event will run from 5.30pm to 9.30pm on Friday March 12 and then 1pm to 9pm on Saturday March 13.

Drive-thru slots can be booked here.

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