With the festival season round the corner, it is obvious that you’d not want to miss out the festive dishes.
On Saturday, June 29, the 4th annual LA Street Food Fest infiltrates the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and creates an alternate reality culinary bizarro world in which street food dishes from a dizzying array of places appear in shockingly close proximity to one another. It’s as if dozens of street corners, plazas, and markets could be lifted from their original digs and transplanted in alluring, pastry-like layers on a single swath of terrain.
Over a hundred popular local purveyors will participate, including Starry Kitchen, Currywurst, Short Order, Rivera and Lazy Ox Canteen. There’ll be an “ice cream social” featuring a baker’s dozen of frozen treat specialists. There’ll be a Singha beer garden, tequila and rum bars, and all manner of goodies designed to turn your stomach and liver into limp custard.
Only 5,000 pre-sale ticket buyers will attend this gluttonous spectacle, and for a fairly reasonable price of $50 ($75 will get you in two hours early). We find it funny when events like this bill themselves as “tastings.” The reality — and it’s really the nature of the beast, not the fault of any organizer — is a booze-drenched rite of gut expansion complicated by the impatience and aggression of fellow attendees clamoring for enough “tastes” to render them comatose. It should be a good time — for eating, drinking, and a vivid perspective on the consumption habits of the privileged.
