It’s that time of year again. Time for the San Francisco Street Food Festival sponsored by La Cocina. This year’s main event is on Saturday August 17, 2013, in the Mission district of SF. And like years past, it will be filled with great local vendors. I was invited to the media preview dinner again (year three — w00t!). My personal highlights are listed below.

Let’s just start with the winner. The best thing at the preview dinner, IMHO, by a long shot. It sounded gross, but it was incredible. Most interesting, delicious food ever. The winner is: Hella Vegan Eats with their Mini Vegan Doughnut Burger. A beet patty, pickled onions, pickles, kale, tomato, and secret sauce, all between two sugar doughnuts. Amazing. Believe it.

Next on my list of favs was Bini’s Kitchen’s Momos. They are Nepalese dumplings (meat or veggie) with spicy tomato cilantro sauce. They were so good! The skin of the dumpling was thicker than I was expecting, and the whole thing was just really delicious. Good sauce, too.

My plus one’s favorite was a roasted plantain bread pudding by a vendor that we can neither remember nor track down online. What, the internet does not know an answer to a question I pose? How is that possible?! Anyway, perhaps the responsible parties will come to light. In the meantime, all we have is this glass slipper — uh — photo of the dessert. Cue Mala’s mouth watering:

Sugarfoot Grits also gave us some yummy grits to nosh on, Onigilly was there in typical good form, and there were also some Russian Vodka-chasing snacks from Anda Piroshki that were pretty fun.

The festival itself has a good lineup this year, including participation by the ever-coveted State Bird Provisions, offering their hand-pulled garlic bread with burrata, which was my favorite during my first and (so far) only visit. Very enticing, guys…

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