Beats and beets: Music festival amps up with gourmet food
SAN FRANCISCO — It's Saturday afternoon in San Francisco and sunlight's triangulating into the massive crimson and gold tent where they're pouring the wines at the Outside Lands festival.
"Looks like Harry Potter," a hat-clad, wine-glass toting, 2 p.m.-tipsy patron tells her friend. She's right. The duo assess the 35 wineries in "Wine Lands" before making their next local selection, venturing deeper into the tent.
Just outside, someone's grilling oysters. Next to that, chowder's being slopped into a bread bowl. There's a curry food truck and one selling artisanal ice cream tacos — 77 local restaurants total spanning and transforming Golden Gate Park for the sold-out, three-day event.
People are eating. People are drinking. There's no rush. Missing is the massive stampede that one's come to expect and love at a giant, multi-stage music festival. (And, don't get us wrong, that is what this is — headliners this year include Elton John, Sam Smith, the Black Keys, Kendrick Lamar, Wilco and Mumford & Sons, powered by more than 3,000 staff and 92 semi-trucks of equipment. The three-day audience is expected to reach 210,000.)
Instead, to the gentle hum of a faraway main stage, a line has formed at the three-hole mini-golf course. Each putt, you get a wine tasting.
Such is the very chill situation in the eighth year of Outside Lands, the annual event that bills itself as the first "gourmet" music festival — and the reason you can get more than a burger and overpriced Bud while watching your favorite band at any fest these days.
As American and Millennial food tastes evolve beyond hot dogs and french fries, music festivals, from Forecastle in Louisville, Ky., to Pitchfork in Chicago, have stepped up their game. Others, like SXSW in Austin and Sweetlife in Columbia, Md., a festival started by sustainable salad chain Sweetgreen, market local, gourmet food experiences along with their music lineups as the ultimate sensory experience.
Outside Lands led it all.
"In 2008 when we started the festival we wanted to differentiate and highlight what was so great about this town — food and drink — so we had the best restaurants come in and do concessions. That was sort of revolutionary," says Kerry Black, 40, the festival's co-founder (and co-founder of Manchester, Tenn.,'s mega-fest, Bonnaroo).
"Fast-forward to a year ago, and people have caught up. So we're onto what's next. We want to keep pushing the concept of food programming, making it fun and mixing it with music, comedy and art, keep innovating."
This year boasts six distinct food experiences: Cheese Lands, Choco Lands, Wine Lands, Beer Lands, A Taste of the Bay Area and GastroMagic.
GastroMagic is where the innovation happens, and it makes Black giddy. The stage is centered in the woods, smushed between four bars with names like Talk Like a Pirate and Let's Get Fizz-ical, and some place selling "bacon flights" on sticks (which Black boasts he "vigorously taste-tested").
This is where food mixes with, well, everything else. Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto is on the docket. So is comedian Pete Holmes and Baltimore musician Dan Deacon. But the biggest draw, reprising her show-stopping, twerk-tactic performance from last year, is the Beignets & Bounce Brunch with Big Freedia and Brenda's Soul Food.
And at 3 p.m. Saturday, things were about to turn up. Fans flocked to the stage for a chance to twerk with the master and eat beignets from San Francisco's iconic brunch spot.
"Every time I go to a festival, I come to shut it down. Everyone wants to shake their (expletive) on the stage. There's people shaking with beignets in their mouth, throwing them in the air — we love the audience and they love us," says Big Freedia. "When the queen come to town, all the queens come around."
Freedia is a cornerstone of the Bounce movement, which is a type of New Orleans-based, up-tempo hip-hop, heavy on the bass and autotune. Yes, it's where twerking originated (sorry, Miley). Bounce shows are a big, raunchy party, and this one's no different, except for the brunch-appropriate wafting scent of bacon from the flights next door.
"It just gets me every every time when I captivate the audience and they're all like holy (expletive), I don't know what I'm experiencing but I love it!" she says.
It's a lot.
Venturing deeper in the woods, away from the beats and gyrations and giddy shrieks and, presumably, powdered sugar, we stumble upon Choco Lands, which is exactly what it sounds like, an enclave of chocolate purveyors and a small crowd of smiling people who've found it.
That's the serendipity of it, and where Outside Lands succeeds in filling all the senses. One can easily see why other festivals are following suit.
Later that night, when the woods is only illuminated by purple and blue lights cast upon the trees, we'll pass Choco Lands again, and perhaps it's closed but maybe we just don't notice this time.
We're swept up in the stream of people, trekking from the Black Keys on one stage to Kendrick Lamar at another, among cigarette smoke and glow lights and costumes and pushy drunk people and all the things that remind us that Outside Lands is, yes, still a big music festival.
Just one with really good food.