Tang x The Great Oven x ATN

It’s not every day you find yourself standing on a field at 10am, surrounded by colleagues (prepping veg, blending hummus, skewering and grilling chicken under the rarest of Irish suns, still others trying to figure out a temporary sales terminal) and all to serve a banquet to 120 people in a tent, as a queue forms at the barriers and a DJ begins to warm up the crowds around us. 

And yet, here we are. It is Friday, the 1st of August. The first day of Ireland’s favourite music festival: All Together Now. This name, it turns out, will take on so much more significance over the coming few days but, at this moment, most of us are only beginning to feel out what it is we are undertaking. 

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It’s a project months in the making. 

In early spring of 2025, Tang was approached by All Together Now, via Ali Dunworth, and asked if we would be interested in collaborating with an organisation called The Great Oven. Since 2019, The Great Oven has been building giant ovens to serve as hubs of sustainable food relief, creative community building and empowerment in areas of crisis and need. 

The premise of our collaboration would be to come up with a food offering at the festival with the goal of helping raise money in support of The Great Oven’s prospective work in the West Bank of Palestine. It was an easy yes. Partly because we have always believed in doing what we can in support of community-based social initiatives, partly because support for Palestine is so, so important to us and — of course — partly because it was a rare opportunity to bring our whole team down to this incredible festival. 

But though we have run events not dissimilar to this in the past, the vision that began to emerge in collaboration with The GO and ATN quickly became something all together new and newly challenging. What ended up emerging was a plan to run three morning barbecue banquets — ticketed, sit-down affairs with guest speakers and DJ’s, which, in the spirit of the festival, we centred around sharing plates at long, communal tables — followed by an open-to-all Middle Eastern barbecue in the afternoons and early evening. An exciting format, and exciting festival food experience. Lots of solidarity and cultural links to Palestine. So far so good. 

But where to begin? 

Most daunting was the sheer scale of the thing, it being our maiden year and with a vision of levelling up the festival’s food offering. How to get enough staff, produce and equipment 160km from our base in Dublin to Curraghmore Estate and there to run a service — banquets and barbeque — with all the things we love: great food, great energy and a coming together of people who would leave feeling like they had experienced something more than just a meal. 

In the days leading up to All Together Now, a few of us began to shuttle back and forth between Dublin and Waterford. The kitchen and campsite were set up, a new open flatbread recipe tried and tested and, the night before, a huge amount of prep completed for service the next day. On Friday morning, most of our team had arrived. We closed all three of our Dublin locations to have our whole team come down and help make this happen. We’d been briefed, done what planning we could, but really we had no idea what to expect. 

This is, in many ways, the nature of working in collaboration: a fair amount of uncertainty, compromise and an abiding faith that, no matter what, we’ll figure it out. 

Scanning the first banquet tickets on Friday morning, we opened the gates not only to the event but also to a feeling of intense relief and a lot of adrenaline. It felt important. Relief that we’d gotten this far and adrenaline to meet the moment with all its newness and uncertainty. 

In truth, we were learning as we went — especially on that first day. Part of the challenge and joy of any service is staying on your toes, working with a lot of flux and responding accordingly. Day-to-day at Tang we’ve had a little over nine years to practice and refine our workflows (and work space!). Here at the festival, we defined them according to the needs of the moment. This is where teams become so important and we’re lucky to have the most special of teams, a team that can be nimble, problem-solve and focus on hosting the people who have put their time and money toward joining us and the cause we’re all working towards. 

One of the best things about the weekend was seeing our different teams come together in ways they don’t often have the opportunity to. We had KPs prepping food, bakers firing flatbreads, drivers barbecuing meats and veggies and waiters who’d never worked a shift together devising totally new orders of service side by side. It was very special. 

We were backed by incredible music from MixMag DJs and a feeling that we were working toward something much bigger than us, bigger than just our jobs. Keith said it best when he said “when you wake up at three am to hop in the van to reload, you’re not waking up for work, you’re waking up for the mission.” 

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Working together and giving it our everything each day was incredibly rewarding for us all by itself. But each night, after we’d turn off the ovens, pack up stock, give everything a good wipe down and sort out our prep for the next day, the festival itself was waiting to reward us even further. 

If you know us well, you know we love a party and, this weekend, it just so happened we had about 3000 acres of party right outside our door. Needless to say, we had a blast. Whether we were listening to Fontaines, watching old colleagues DJ in the forest, singing our hearts out to Nelly or sweating up a storm to some Italo-Disco in a tent filled with drag queens, we all made memories we hope never to forget. Rumour has it some of us still can’t listen to CMAT’s Euro-Country without tearing up. 

And yet, the source of the most tears all weekend came on Sunday. 

Lunchtime service was in full swing, we’d been serving non-stop for a few hours, and the line showed no sign of dwindling. Those of us firing flatbreads — Sofia, Jana and Jack — were making a big show of tossing them up in the air, spinning them around, in a All Together Now Sunday afternoon flow, dancing to the sounds of the MixMag tent adjacent to us. 

Then, totally unexpectedly and with one incredibly smooth fake fall, Decio (who had been milling about with a kind of nervous excitement) came down to one knee behind Jana and, from his pocket, pulled out a small black box. Jana stopped in her tracks, a flatbread still resting in her hands. The rest of us lost it... cheering, jumping, crying. She said yes! 

Getting to share that moment with them had to be the highlight of the festival and maybe even of our whole nine years at Tang! 

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At the end of the day, while everything about what we experienced, learned and achieved at All Together Now is important, our main goal was to raise money for Palestine. We were really pleased early on to have sold out each day’s banquet but what had always been a bit of an uncertainty was how we would get on with the afternoon barbecue sales. 

We’ll be honest... the Friday afternoon sales were pretty flat versus what we wanted or expected. It was a bummer, and we were worried. But we did have a decent dinner rush and the feedback was very positive so we felt things would get better as the word got out. And like that... on the second day, the first day’s total doubled. And on the third day, the previous total almost doubled again. 

We think that’s huge, not only because of the money it represents for the cause but also because it points to the strength of what we were doing and what we were doing it for. Day 2 was full of day 1’s customers, or people who had been told by friends to make their way over to us. There’s maybe no greater compliment than having word of mouth be your greatest driver. It means that something about your offering — the food, or the energy, the solidarity, or some combination of all three — has had enough of an impact on someone to make them want to spread the word. And that’s what we went in hoping for. 

All in all, we couldn’t be more pleased with how it all went and we’re grateful to everyone who helped make that happen — not only the festival and The Great Oven, but also those businesses who supported our raffle with prizes, friends and suppliers who helped with logistics (special shout out to Sean Ring here), and, of course, everyone who came and bought a flatbread or a barbecue plate, or just a cola. Every contribution helped us achieve what we did and it’s an achievement we share with everyone involved. We were so pleased to be able to hand that money over. 

Looking back, our whole team had an incredible opportunity to connect in a way we haven’t before, to be really All Together Now. We can’t overstate how grateful we are for that. To have been able to do so is a huge privilege, given our relative safety, security and freedom from persecution. We know the money raised can only have a small impact in the greater scheme of the Palestinian struggle but we hope, as ever, for the safety and prosperity of the Palestinian people and a free, free Palestine.