Alright, I'm no bougie foodie, and I will try (and devour) nearly anything edible, but lemme get a crack at this.

I got a GA ticket by way of a ticket dump program I subscribe to (great start), so getting there and in only cost me the MTA fare, but they were really selling $50 round-trip ferry tickets. Frankly, I think a free ticket is the only way I'd do it again.

Let's start with the food samples they gave – I trust anyone here to figure out which is which:

• KFC tenders on a hash brown/mashed potato waffle
• Red Robin jalepeño burger; triple pickle onion rings (with caviar for some reason?)
• Panda Express x (not-so-) Hot Ones bourbon chicken; sweet & sour chili crunch oyster mushrooms
• General Ock/Tums chopped cheese in empanada "shell"
• Cracker Barrel country fried gravy biscuit sandwich
• PopUp Bagel with raspberry(? maybe strawberry? it was tart) cheesecake schmear (and everything pizza schmear but I didn't try it)
• Portillo's Haute Dog with the works and potato chip crumbles
• Krispy Kreme pumpkin spice donut (I haven't tried it yet but it's Krispy Kreme and I stole two, can you really go wrong)
• Hot Dog on a Stick "elote" dog, with elote toppings and corn

Also bought the Skrewball iced tea cocktail, but only chose this specific one because it came with a nifty reusable plastic "glass." I just really needed something to keep me company while I was solo in line.

Personal standouts were the fried oyster mushrooms from Panda Express and the cheesecake schmear from PopUp Bagels.

Everything else was… fine. As a whole, it wasn't exceptional. It's all clearly, evidently built for the big numbers, and so I think it lost a bit of its appeal as "elevated" versions of these dishes. The best example I can give is how the country fried steak lacked that tiny, subtle crisp/char/idk I love from Cracker Barrel's fresh dishes. But also, a lot of people have just never had Cracker Barrel, and so I'd argue there are worse introductory samples, which I suppose is some of the point of this festival.

On top of that, "gimmicky" feels both too rude of a word, yet precise in what I want to convey for a lot of the dishes. Here the example is them slapping a bit of caviar(???) on the Red Robin onion rings. I joked that all it did was make the $5.80 transit fare worth it. The Portillo's dog also felt very shoehorned in. (PopUp Bagels has mastered the art of the gimmick, though – I'm very biased towards them, but I hate cream cheese, yet loved the cheesecake schmear.)

It's a festival, and so I also get to bitch about, you know, festival things. There was exactly one public shaded tent, maybe 30'x30', for the entire rain-or-shine festival that ended up being a sunny, high-70s September day. They tacked a 75 cent "venue fee" onto every purchase, too, which is nonsense when the only water at a food festival is a $5 Poland Spring. (But hey, at least it's Poland Spring and not some generic bulk brands, lmfao /bitterjoke) Lines also got pretty long and weren't really managed beyond a certain point, though thankfully people kindly organized themselves, and shout-out to KFC for its ingenuity with the sauce samples.

Thankfully, the portapotties were abundant, supervised, and had those little cruddy but sufficient hand washing stations, and while they were slightly far, I would argue that's a good thing at an outdoor food festival.

There were also a few free goodies from Tums (including free Tums), Chuck E Cheese, and the human claw machine from Red Robin (if you endured the wait). Wish I got more. Alas. And the lawn games were cute, but I didn't have company for them 🙁

tl;dr mid

(definitely not a $100+ event as it is. maybe some free water stations would change my mind)

Hit me with any questions, except about VIP because I'm broke.