Good festival idea gone really really bad ...

Apparently they had a Great American Food and Music festival that went really really bad.
Highlights:
3 hour waits for any food
2 hour waits for pastrami sandwiches only to be told they ran out
The food being sold by "famous restaurants" was not the food sold in the restaurant
The payment system broke down
They had a food and wine paring seminar with ummm NO FOOD

Read all about it here:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/06/the-great-american-food-and-music-fest-is-today-june-13.html

http://www.yelp.com/topic/mountain-view-great-american-food-and-music-festival


Warning, bad language
http://www.eatmedaily.com/

If they do it again next year, I have a feeling the crowds won't be so bad!

Wow, the amount of people that were complaining was unreal.

Ouch!  I really feel sorry for Ed Levine.  His heart must be crushed.

Man, when a festival goes bad it usually doesn't do it by halves, it goes ALL THE WAY. Usually it's down to the event organizer but sometimes it's just gotta be a voodoo curse or something. It wasn't the restaurant industry that taught me to avoid a cluster f*ck but it's a crucial skill.

Year or two ago they had the Blue Angels out at a municipal airport. Now just a couple of miles up the road is Luke Air Force Base, it's huge, it's paved, it can accomodate hundreds of thousands of visitors. It's where they housed and serviced the Bue Angel aircraft the whole time. But no, some bunch of town people with pull had to have it in this dusty field.

Now what to do about all this dust? Why, spray water on it naturally. So you can think of it like theres the runway, then the people watching, then the vendors off on the periphery. And they start hosing the place down. And they turn the whole freaking place into a mudpit.

So here's the crowd creeping forward onto the runway and the event people telling them no, move back into the mud. To get to the vendors, people had to walk through 100 feet of mud. The vendors were standing in mud. Everything had mud in or on it. And the people were p1ssed. These were not happy people. And here's the sun merrily blazing away overhead. I just got to a good position and enjoyed the show. Some things are just screwed from the get-go and there's nothing you can do.

BigRedLunchbox


Apparently they had a Great American Food and Music festival that went really really bad.
Highlights:
3 hour waits for any food
2 hour waits for pastrami sandwiches only to be told they ran out
The food being sold by "famous restaurants" was not the food sold in the restaurant
The payment system broke down
They had a food and wine paring seminar with ummm NO FOOD

Read all about it here:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/06/the-great-american-food-and-music-fest-is-today-june-13.html

http://www.yelp.com/topic/mountain-view-great-american-food-and-music-festival


Warning, bad language
http://www.eatmedaily.com/

Oh trust me I heard the complaints in person . This event was right by my house and I was supposed to attend  but I passed because I hosted a UFC party at my house on the same date. Some of my friends took their GF's to the event and showed up at my house ($65 in the hole) after the event starving because they didn't even get their free plate with admission. I am so glad I passed on this because I really wanted to go bad. One of my friends stuck it out because he wasn't leaving without his grub. 3 hour wait for brisket, and I beleive he waited 5 hours for dessert.