LA Street Food Fest 2012 | Pasadena, CA

What could be better than being a foodie in Southern California?  How about put 100 food trucks and restaurants all in the same place, for one all you can eat drink price, and call it a festival…. And that my friends is the LA Street Food Fest at the Rose Bowl last weekend.  Talk about a food frenzy!

This was my first food festival, and I splurged a little bit and got the early bird ticketing, where you and 1499 of your closest friends get to go into the event 2 hours early to sample all of the food and drink, and then your other 5000 friends get invited to the party later.  For the extra $20, worth it.

Lets get this out of the way really quickly, even with only 1500 people there, it still looked crowded to me, and the lines were about 5 minutes long, if there was a decent line to be had.  I couldn’t imagine more people.  Plus, the first two booths I went to in the front ran out of food as soon as I got to the front of the line.  On to the next one.

So lets get to the good stuff, I hit about 20 different vendors in about 2 hours, and with the beating sun, I was pooped!  I just wanted to mention some of my favorites, but put up all of the pictures :)

Here are some of the hits:
Of the tasty and exotic (in my opinion) were the cows brain and the fried pigs ears.   Honestly, once you got past the name, they were quite delicious.  If you didnt know they were pigs ears, it was just fried pork, and the cow brain really had nothing too it, it was more curry than spongy brain.  Tasty none the less.

On the milder side were the Beef Tacular, Berkshire Pork and Chicken slider from CambalaCHE’s Gourmet  They were perfect for this occasion; light, flavorful, and just enough to give you a good sense that you wanted to go back and have more, or better yet, find those restaurants/trucks and dine there.

And then always my favorite are Pork Belly and the Flaming fried pork balls.  Seoul Sausage has been one of my favorite trucks since I got to LA.  Korean BBQ in such a delivery format begs to be eaten!  And they do it so well.  On the other hand, I love pork belly, and I could see where this one was going.  Although flavorful, this was not the type of food to be sitting out in a chafing dish waiting for the casual diner.  Korean BBQ needs to be hot and right off the grill to be really delicious.

And now some of the misses..

I love gravy, but putting gravy on fries, was not my cup of tea.
The beef tongue curry had more going for it in the name rather than what was on the plate.
I didnt really quite get what  the Maize Coronet was trying to accomplish?  It was topped with a slice of jalapeño slice, and thats all I tasted.
And the pork sandwich with nutella back, did not work well in the heat.  The actual sandwich dried out and bread was a little stale, and didnt really understand the pairing..

But the star of the show was definitely the shaved ice and the ice cream social section.  I cant tell you how hot it is on a saturday.. in the middle of summer…  in southern california…  about 4pm….  on concrete…  So it was no wonder these had some of the longest lines.  Pineapple and cilantro was a new combination to me and there was a little taste shock on the first bite, but it grew on me, and I knew I should have gone back for more, but I felt the meat coma coming on.

All in all, great outing for a couple hours.  I tried alot of good food, some things that I was not a fan, but I will be looking forward to this again next year.

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