A Very British Evening of Pie Delights

Oh what a night!

The third meeting of Private Pie was our biggest and most successful yet.

The Venue:
We held our meet in one of my very favourite pubs in Newcastle, The Bridge Hotel. Initially we thought of their function room upstairs, but when I discussed the idea with the landlady, she had the brilliant idea of using the snug downstairs instead. This meant that we had easy access to the great variety of real ales that were on offer. And as we all know, real ale and pies are the perfect partners! It also meant that we got an awful lot of jealous stares from other pub patrons. Many thanks to their staff for being so brilliant with us.

As we approached The Bridge Hotel, we started to get a bit nervous. Before us appeared to be a rather large film crew, huge lighting rigs etc. We breathed a sigh of relief when we realised that (this time anyway) we weren't being made into a film, but that a Newcastle Brown Ale commercial was being filmed. How cool is that? A more Geordie experience would be hard to find.

The Theme:

Well, since it's British Pie Week, it would have been very rude to not have a Great British Pie theme. And oh yes, we are professional in every way shape and form, so we had homemade bunting, Union Jack cocktail sticks (with the Union Jack possibly the wrong way round, which only occurred to me later :-S) and a beautifully professional cardboard and sellotape affair depicting good old Cedric donning a crown and a union jack flag.

Just too professional for words...

The Pies:

Oh my, we had such a brilliant selection! In a stunning twist of fate, my camera actually worked this time, but apologies if I didn't get pics of everyone's pie. I wasn't actually feeling that hungry, so only had a small selection of a few. Best Pie Pun has to go to Kevin, with his Key Limey Pie, whilst our first ever rude (and potentially libellous) pie went to Ange and Alex for their George Michael's Cottaging Pie. Most Complimented pie goes to Caren for her triple berries pie (people were pretty much scraping the pie dish for the last remnants, it was so good), whilst most gruesomely delicious pie has to go to Martin and his Stargazy pie.
 

Martin's Stargazy pie

George Michael's Cottaging Pie by Ange and Alex

Jenni's Forrester's pie. mmmmm, full of lovely venison goodness.

North Country Tart

Kevin's Key Limey Pie

Caren's delicious triple berries pie

For more pictures, have a look at our Facebook page

The People:
Wow, what a brilliant bunch came along. We were pleased to see some familiar faces, especially Caren and Kevin who came to our very first meeting. And we welcomed a whole load of new people, who all seemed really enthusiastic about the whole idea. Everyone seemed to get along famously, have a great time, and eat some delicious beer, and most people were really keen to snap up places for our next meeting, which was announced at the start of the meeting. I'd particularly like to thank the generous people who sponsored me for my firewalk. It's also really great to get to know the people that we tweet regularly- the North East seems to have a really vibrant twitter community.

All in all, a brilliant evening- and that's even despite me managing to drop my pint, leading to an embarrassingly loud crash, a broken pint glass, and a covering of beer on my jeans for the rest of the evening.

Thank you so much guys for making Private Pie such a huge success.