The advertising puff reads: “One of the country’s foremost gourmet events, the Cape Town Good Food and Wine Show, promises to, once again, whet the appetites of Mother City foodies at the Cape Town International Convention Centre . . . As a major highlight, British- born foul-mouthed celebrity chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsay is billed to headline the 2013 culinary festival.”

I was a bit miffed that they did not mention that one of Cape Town’s (if not South Africa’s) foremost cooking engineers would be attending. Which I did. Attend, that is. The show was held in three halls of the Cape Town International Convention Centre and featured many, many stalls selling food, drinks, wine, knives, books, utensils, cookery courses, induction cookers, T-shirts, aprons, gloves, absorbent sponges, mats . . . a thousand things.

One of my favourite stands was the one devoted to Lucky Star fish products. One cannot call them gourmet foodstuffs but, heck, I have travelled Africa with cans of Lucky Star and, after walking miles in the bush, bread toasted over an open fire with Lucky Star pilchards is a hard act to follow. The mussels are not bad either.

I always wonder about the Cape Town International Convention Centre. This centre, along with the Good Hope Centre, the Bellville Velodrome and Hangar 1 at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, in New Jersey, has terrible acoustics owing to having large reverberant airspaces. Oh, perhaps, I am just being mean! Hangar 1 at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, in New Jersey, is actually not as bad as the others.

Why, one wonders, are the roofs of the Cape Town International Convention Centre exhibition halls so far up? They must be 20-plus metres. For what purpose? You could exhibit an oceangoing yacht in there, fully rigged (well, you would have to get it through the parking garage with a 2 m clearance and up the escalator, but you get the idea). The halls have not one item of acoustic cladding.

The result is that a show like the Cape Town Good Food and Wine Show has the noise level of a mixture between a large fish market, a central bus station and the advance on Moscow. You cannot communicate. Most stall holders have little microphones feeding loudspeakers and this is just so they can tell you the price of their cooking pots. Or whatever.

Now wait! Did I write that “the halls have not one item of acoustic cladding”? Oh, so wrong. They have, in fact, in the corridors and part of the hall cladding which is supposed to be acoustic in that it looks like a slat absorber – wooden slats about 44 mm × 44 mm with cloth behind and an airspace beyond that. But Nope! The slats are there all right but they are fixed to a cloth which is fixed to a plastered wall. So it looks like a slat absorber but is in fact just slats glued to the wall acoustically similar to a sheet of corrugated iron.

Moving right along, the lighting in the convention centre consists of rows and rows of twin-tube open-fluorescent fittings mounted to the underside of the roof. Which lights up the area about 3 m below the roof. Since the floor level is 17 m below that, the visitors trip around in near gloom. Oh, well.

But the stands were interesting. The lady giving the Golden Cloud baking demo taught me more about baking in 15 minutes than I had learned in 20 years. She should get a medal. And, yes, Eskom had a stand. Eskom sees itself as some sort of benevolent relative who supports local events, even if a stand costs R50 000. But I was surprised. Eskom? Cooking ? Didn’t make sense. Oh, I thought, perhaps they want people to realise that you can cook using a stove. Could this be true? I walked to the Eskom stand. I was right. Well, half right. There was a stove there. Worked on gas. I also saw Gordon Ramsay from a distance. “Hi Gordon!” I shouted. “%%88 off,” he said. Well, not really. He waved.