Next week on Saturday August 20, 2011, the San Francisco Street Food Festival kicks off it’s third annual event from 11am-7pm on and around Folsom Street between 22nd and 26th Streets in the Mission district of SF. I believe that I, and friends, will be attending. These desserts will be there:
South American sugar cookies that are fabulous on the left, “cake pops” on the right that are magical.
This event is created and hosted by La Cocina, a “business incubator” non-profit organization that helps local low-income food entrepreneurs gain the experience, knowledge, and resources needed to become successful and sustainable small businesses. What does this mean? These guys provide stuff like education and rent-able small kitchen space (and more) to your local food cart lady who makes kick-ass tamales so that she can buy a food truck, start a catering business, or open a full scale restaurant to get her business off the ground. This is just an example, of course, but basically they support local and typically minority and low-income women to give a leg-up into the food industry. So that everyone can enjoy Tamale Lady’s tamales or Hummus Lady’s hummus. Sounds good to me.
The Street Food Festival is a showcase of La Cocina success stories and works-in-progress and features food from 30 La Cocina micro-vendors, in addition to 25 owner-operated restaurants, a handful of mobile food trucks, a few select nationwide vendors, and more. Sounds like a day of food, drink, and fun to me. 🙂
And I was privileged to be invited to the media preview dinner a few weeks ago to enjoy some of the food, learn about the vendors, the festival, and La Cocina, and to meet some nice folks. See photos below, and see you at the SFSFF!
Welcome to the preview dinner…
Food they fed us at this dinner! It was pretty awesome. Click to enlarge and further scrutinize. You know you want to.
Plus we got sweet badges… notice that Boyfriend’s name on his badge is “GuestAngie”. Indeed.
Plus, they gave out these sweet temp tattoos of their birdie logo, which made me feel badass for about a week. (Ok, fine, two weeks.)
I was there too! Tastebud stupor by the time we got to the sit down dinner… Will have to remedy that on Saturday. You going to the media walkthrough?
Oh how funny! We got there a bit late, so we didn’t get much to eat before the dinner, unfortunately. I don’t think I’m going to the media walkthrough, I think I’ll just poke around later in the day for a bit. I hope the weather is better than today! 🙂