What’s better than a great party? A great party with a purpose. The Great Oven Disco Cantina is a new event at this year’s All Together Now festival from July 31st to August 3rd at the Curraghmore Estate, Co Waterford, bringing together big names in food, music and art with a brilliant objective – to send a community oven to Palestine.
This new stage and tent will feature food from Tang restaurants, the sounds of Palestinian radio station Radio Alhara, sets from the global electronic music platform Mixmag and surprise Irish artists. Everyone is coming together to raise funds to support an initiative by the Great Oven to set up their first base in Palestine.
Founded by chef and TV producer James Gomez Thompson, the Great Oven is an organisation that builds giant, decorated community ovens in refugee camps, conflict zones and informal settlements. He first heard stories of community ovens as a child from his Spanish mother and grandmother. While filming a BBC series in Lebanon with Nigel Slater, he discovered similar ovens being used there.
Lebanese producer Nour Matraji shared stories of her grandmother baking bread in a community oven during the civil war, and the pair joined forces to create a community oven in Tripoli with peace-building in mind. It led to an epiphany, Gomez Thompson says, “that it shouldn’t just be a thing for television, it should be an organisation that really exists”. The Great Oven was born in 2019, starting in Lebanon.
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“It was the peak of the Syrian migrant crisis and then the Beirut port explosion. But we realised we could put ovens in refugee camps and use them for emergency disaster relief.” They wanted to offer an alternative to traditional food aid and handouts, which can be temporary and impersonal.
“People need a place to cook for themselves, there’s a simple dignity in the ritual of preparing your own food or sharing food,” says Gomez Thompson.
The ovens are built from steel and refractory bricks; they are generally made in the style of the country in which they are built; they have made a number of Lebanese-style Manakish ovens. They can weigh up to two tonnes, and run on gas.
“A lot of people look at them and think you can just do bread, but we do everything in there. We tend to do lots of big shared tray bakes, we work with the food available.”
Local artists are invited to decorate them. “The ovens become safe spaces around which culture starts flourishing too,” says Gomez Thompson. “People care more if they feel ownership.” The ovens become hubs for cooking, teaching, sharing and bringing people together.
So far, Great Oven has set up nine ovens in Lebanon and South Africa and is now expanding to Palestine, which is where one of the ovens from the Great Oven Disco Cantina at All Together Now will end up. The festival event is acting as a springboard and fundraiser for the Palestinian project, which aims to build a cultural bridge between Palestine and Ireland.
Gomez Thompson has been based in Ireland in recent years, where he says he has found a strong connection between his work and the country’s outlook. He also has family connections here. “I’m half Spanish, half Irish. I spent a considerable amount of my childhood here, so it’s great that Ireland has become such a sanctuary for this project.”
The two decorated ovens, which are central to the Great Oven Disco Cantina event at All Together Now, have been decorated at the Irish Museum of Modern Art by Irish artists Maser and Aches. The food cooked in them at All Together Now will be from Tang, who are closing their Dublin restaurants for the weekend and sending their team to Waterford to run daily five-course banquets and an all-day barbecue. The menu has been created by Gomez Thompson and Tang chef Keith Coleman, featuring recipes from Great Oven refugee cooks.
And there will be plenty of dancing. Music has played a big role in the Great Oven’s story – early on, they turned a damaged Beirut venue into a community kitchen with a dance floor, connecting with an online Palestinian station Radio Alhara. DJs from the station will play at Great Oven Disco Cantina across the weekend, and Mixmag (the UK online dance music magazine) will host Ireland’s first Mixmag Lab set, which will be streamed globally.
Once the festival ends, the real journey begins and the ovens will be taken to their new homes. One will go to the Wonder Cabinet creative hub in the West Bank. The other will live at Bohemian Football Club in north Dublin where it will be central to a new programme of community events – a collaboration between Gomez Thompson and Seán McCabe, Bohs’ head of climate justice and sustainability – including dinners, pop-ups and possibly match day food, and involving local migrants and economically vulnerable people.
“We want to bring everything we’ve learnt in some of the hardest places in the world, and see how they can be applied here,” says Gomez Thompson. “We want to make it a safe space for people from different backgrounds to start cooking and dining together. We want to do community-building banquets, very much like what we are doing at the festival. Food is the great equaliser between people.”
