There are few counties I hold in higher regard than Oxfordshire, and fewer settings still that do it more justice than Blenheim Palace - an 18th century seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, and the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill. Put a house of that pedigree in the hands of the Gentleman’s Journal for an afternoon, and you can more or less guarantee something worth writing about. This year’s Long Summer Lunch, 150 guests strong, was no exception.
The twist, though, was in the detail. Rather than the usual English fare you might expect beneath the Orangery, the lunch unfolded in the palatial Italian Gardens - and the menu followed the setting’s lead: rosemary focaccia did the rounds first, followed by grilled Blenheim lamb and roast beef, running alongside a Mediterranean showing of burrata, a classic caprese, and a plate of Sicilian chilli tiger prawns. Dessert closed the loop with lemon cheesecake and tiramisu showing the true marriage of cultures. It’s a pairing that shouldn’t work quite as well as it does - an English palace playing host to a Mediterranean spread - but that was the idea!
If you closed your eyes for a moment, you could believe yourself to be on the Amalfi coast, minus the queues and the sunburnt tourists (and the terrible 3/4 length shorts and white socks of Americans, sorry!) - plus the added benefit of being flown in by helicopter from my local airfield made the lunch truly accessible.
Following some contemplation I’ll say this: it’s one of the few gatherings left on the summer calendar that still feels like it belongs to the people actually there, rather than to whoever’s filming it. No stampede of content-first attendees hovering by the best-lit corner of the garden, no queue for the “shot” before the food’s even arrived - just a saxophonist working his way through the entire Italo-disco songbook, and a crowd immersed in the moment. Attending many events throughout the year of similar stature, I can say that’s increasingly rare, and increasingly worth noting when you find it.
The Italian Gardens, as it turns out, were built for exactly this sort of afternoon: sunlight bouncing off stone urns, box hedging clipped neatly, and just enough shade to retreat into once the midday sun started catching up with us. By late afternoon, as the light softened into that particular gold that only ever seems to happen in the English countryside in midsummer (helped in part by the completely scorched fields of yellow in the midst of our worst drought on record), it was already time for our helicopters to leave, and with that, I was wishing the Long Summer Lunch was just a fraction longer!
Events like this are becoming harder to find in their pure form - most of the summer calendar now seems built around the photograph rather than the afternoon itself. The Long Summer Lunch, in its own quietly confident way, still manages to be about the latter. Add a setting as storied as Blenheim, a menu that borrows its best ideas from two countries at once, and a guest list that actually seems to be enjoying itself rather than purely performative, and you have one of the better long lunches of the summer - Italian in spirit, British at its core.
Cheers Gentleman’s Journal, until the next one!
Azzam