LA Street Food Festival: The Bad

Yesterday's post was LA Street Food Festival: The Good, and there was a lot of it. Today, The Bad and, well, there was a lot of that too.

The Entrance Line:

Be on-time and up-front with us

Let's begin with the line to get in. This was a madhouse. Short of using another venue, I don't know what could have been done about the fact that the line had to wind down the block, through a parking lot and back out onto the street. Fine. Whatever.

I do know that if I show up 20 minutes before an event starts, I sure as hell don't want to wait 90 minutes in the sun to get in...forty minutes after the event was supposed to start. I'm not sure if they let in VIP ticketholders first and let them have first dibs on the food trucks but, if they did, hey, great--they're paying $25 more than I am. I just would have appreciated being told that VIPs were going to be let in at 11, and I was going to be let in starting at 11:30. I'm pretty sure other people agreed because, at around 11:20, people in line started abandoning ship.

The Tickets:

PRE-SELL, PRE-SELL, PRE-SELL!!!!

It was really smart to sell VIP tickets ahead of time, but they should have done the same for the $5 general admission tickets as well. This would have not only allowed those putting on the event to have an idea of how many people were coming but would have also sped up the entry process. There could have even been two lines--one for people with tickets and one for those purchasing at the door.

The VIP Tickets:

All I get is a bathroom and a gift bag?

The $30 VIP tickets gave you:

"access to above street-level VIP patio with a bird's eye view of the fest, goodie bag, exclusive bites not available to general admission attendees, private bar, access to indoor restrooms and more"

So, you're paying $30 for a place to sit down, pee (or is this the same thing as a place to sit down?), a bag with BBQ sauce in it and a dim sum sample? Color me unimpressed. I decided that this wasn't worth it when I realized that, after paying $30, I'd STILL have to pay for all of the food I wanted.

The LA Street Food Fest should have take a page out of the book of the Big Apple BBQ Festival and pre-sold different levels of fast passes, which grant you access to a separate line and food credits to use at different vendors. For example, paying $100 for a BBQ festival (or street food festival) might seem like a heavy chunk of change, but, when you consider the lines you're by-passing and the food credits you're given, it might be worth it.

The Venue:

Way too small and congested

I think that the LA Street Food Fest team sorely underestimated how much Angelenos love them their food trucks. LA Center Studios had a big space but definitely not big enough.

This part of the festival had trucks lined up facing one another in a pretty narrow area. Add people in lines for food and people trying to get to beer for a "suggested donation," and you have a disaster. This was really poorly planned and was next to impossible to get through as the day wore on.

The Lines and Crowd:

Wait, they're still letting people in??

When Josh, Aaron and I left J in the LudoBites Line to go get Get Shaved, the place was, overall, pretty crowded. When we came back, however, it was unbelievable how many people were there and how significantly all of the lines had grown. Probably around the 90 minute mark in the LudoBites line (where we had a good view of the General Admission line), I thought, "They're still letting people in?? Can't they see how crowded it is?"

The number of new people let in throughout the day was disproportionate to the number leaving and the festival, essentially, became a huge clusterf*ck the later it got. There definitely needed to be a cap on the number of people admitted at some point because I really don't think it was worth the time anyway if you were one of the people who got there later in the day.

Some of the clusterf*cked-ness, however, was because there were so many people...and no real lines. People had to snake all over the place wherever they could fit, and you couldn't even tell which line went with what truck. There should have been cordoned off lines designated where you line up for which truck--like this, again at the Big Apple BBQ Festival:

Photo of Big Apple BBQ Festival from NTang

There also really, really, REALLY needed to be more places to sit down. My legs are pretty strong from lots of time spent with my Jillian Michaels workout DVDs, but even I was dead by the end of the day.

So, there you have it. My two cents. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what the LA Street Food Festival did right and did wrong. Who knows? Maybe we can help them out for next year...