ISLAMABAD: Islamabad Eat, a famous food festival of the Pakistani capital, returned to the city in its true spirit, after a two-year absence induced by the outbreak of COVID-19, which halted many other excursion and sports activities in the country besides the festival.

The two-day event is being held on Saturday-Sunday in the city’s famous F-9 park with around 70 stalls of mainly local food, and scores of foodies are thronging to the venue to celebrate the festival of food and music and take a sigh of relief.

The festival is an indication that life is slowly getting back to normal despite COVID-19.

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Amal Mubeen, a 21-year-old university student, and her group of friends are some of the many visitors of the festival. They came to the event not only to enjoy food but also to formally restart the normal life activities after the country’s recent curb on a fifth wave of the pandemic triggered off by the Omicron variant.

“The best way to welcome the spring is to have a get-together with friends at a scenic place, enjoying good food and listening to good music, and Islamabad Eat is an opportunity to have it all,” Mubeen told Xinhua.

“I hope that more such events will keep on taking place this whole spring not only to mark the beginning of spring but also to celebrate the success against the pandemic,” she said.

The festival’s organizers believed that the event is more than just a celebration of food, as it also gives a chance to home-based chefs especially women to display their cooking skills and expand their business.

“The idea of the festival came to us nine years ago when we started it in the southern port city of Karachi, then over the next three years, we expanded it to other cities including Islamabad,” Aslam Khan, one of the organizers, told Xinhua.

“We are proud to say that over the last few years, 60 to 70 big restaurants of the home-based cooks who started off with the eat festival have been opened in the country and are doing successful business,” Khan added.

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He said that the basic concept of the festival is to promote home-based food business and celebrate local chefs who are good at making local or foreign food which is famous in the country.

Talking about the impact of the pandemic on the festival, he said that despite a two-year break, the crowd is back and more and more people are thronging to the park to attend the festival.

“We are also ensuring to comply with the COVID-19 guidelines as the pandemic is not over yet, and we are also making sure that only vaccinated people are allowed to buy tickets and enter the venue,” Khan said.

A few food stalls with Chinese food prepared and sold by locals were also a part of the festival, and a number of visitors were savouring it.

Abdul Samad Ameen, a young Pakistani owner of Capital Delights, a stall serving Chinese food at the festival, told Xinhua that Sichuan chicken, beef chilli dry, Kung Pao Chicken, chow mein, and dumplings are the favourites of Pakistanis among Chinese cuisine.

“I am offering Chinese food in my homemade food business because Chinese food is getting very famous in Pakistan because of its good taste. It is the first time when I brought my business to Islamabad Eat, and I am getting an overwhelming response,” said Ameen.

“In the future, I will add more Chinese dishes to the menu,” he added.