This weekend I attended the Second Annual Foodbuzz Festival in San Francisco. The festival was a three day event opened to food bloggers for a weekend of eating, drinking, networking, and educational sessions. The festival is free for Foodbuzz members.
I had opted not to attend last year, and after reading posts from others, I immediately regretted my decision to not attend. So this year, I cleared my calendar and booked my tickets early.
The festival started Friday night, with a welcome reception and a Street Fare Food event held at Fort Mason. When we checked in, we were given a huge tote bag full of free swag, including lots of kitchen gadgets and some food samples and coupons.
We arrived at Fort Mason early, and so I got a chance to explore it a little bit before the Foodbuzz event was ready. Apparently, every Friday, there are a group of food trucks that park inside Fort Mason. They looked so delicious, but I saved my appetite for the free food that was to come. I wish we had a similar set up in San Diego. Even a gathering of LA food trucks usually requires an admission fee. Here, the event is free and it happens every Friday.
The evening’s event took place inside a large building which used to be a former theater. As soon as we entered, we were greeted with cups of wine. Wine was very prevalent for the next three days. It was actually quite hard to find water.
On each table, there was a large platter of various cheese and breads. Everyone seemed to be pretty busy taking pictures of the platter, but most of the platters were left untouched, which is a shame because I enjoyed the food on the platter.
I had opted to not bring my large dslr camera to the first event, thinking it would get in the way and would be annoying to take pictures, especially since we would be eating street food. But once I arrived, almost everyone there had their dslr cameras and were snapping away. Dslr cameras were strung around blogger’s necks as commonly as necklaces. I made sure to use my dslr for the rest of the events so I could have better photos.
One of the features of the street food fare were cupcakes made by Mission cupcakes. Camera crews were filming from the Food Network, as they will soon be featured on an episode of Cupcake Wars. Hundreds of mini cupcakes were set up to spell “Foodbuzz.”
I had some cupcakes at the end of the event. I really enjoyed them, though I enjoyed certain flavors better than others. Usually I hate frosting, but the frosting on these minis were quite light and I didn’t mind eating the frosting.
Various vendors were set up inside the building serving up street food. I was lazy about taking pictures. It’s definitely a challenge to be standing around and eating and snapping pictures of your food. So I only took a few pictures, even though I sampled everything.
This is a taco from Namu, and it ended up being one of my favorite items of the night. Korean style marinated beef was served on pieces of seaweed.
Fried pork sandwiches from the 4505. The line for this was really long. I really enjoyed the pork, but this sandwich was definitely heavy. The pork is deep fried and it is served with a side chicharrones.
The Roli Roti sandwiches were also a popular station that night. People seemed fascinated by the pork being sliced to make sandwiches. The pork had layers of fat wrapped in. I actually was not very fond of this. I don’t like eating slices of meat with chunks of fat on it.
Spencer on the Go was on of the trucks that participated in the Food Truck Race. They had some unique menu items including a lobster cappucino, escargot lollipops and lamb cheek sandwiches. I chose to try all three.
The lobster cappuccino had a good flavor to it but it was so watery. Catty Critic thought that lobster chunks would have made the soup so much better, and I agree.
The escargot lollipop was very oily and I could barely taste the escargot. The lamb sandwich was alright, but I was pretty full by this point so I couldn’t finish it.
There were quite a few other stations I sampled, but didn’t snap pictures of including pizza, chick curry wraps, paella, ice cream.
Despite being pretty full, I did manage to grab a few more mini cupcakes before exiting for the night.
I didn’t completely love the various food offerings, and it was especially hard to get excited when the outside food truck offerings seemed much more tempting. It was fun to mix and mingle with people though. In general, I met a lot of people during the weekend, and it was nice to finally put a face to blogs I’ve been reading. I got to meet/hang out with The Catty Critic, Fooding 411, The Cilantropist, Foodie/Nutritionist, and Nibbles of Tidbits, just to name a few.
It was very nice meeting and dining with the two of you!! We had the best table at the event 🙂 I hope to get to San Diego for a tasting extravaganza sometime. If I do, I’ll consult with you. And when I get around to writing my post, I’ll surely be linking to your site too.
Ciao, chow, Shelly
It was so fun meeting you too! And I agree, we had the best table 😉
hi kirbie
sounds like such a fun event! very cool! and you got a goodie bag too! yay!
that water bottle with the m? what flavor was that? i’ve seen those before…
am debating whether to get a dslr camera but dislike the idea of having a huge camera with me.
Wow, good eye. My pic of the bag of goodies was so sucky. The water flavor is mint. This was the first time I’ve seen them. I have the same problem with dslr. There is such a big diff in picture quality but I don’t like having a huge camera on me and drawing attention to myself. But then, I’ve also seen a lot of non-food bloggers take pictures with a big camera of their food and they seem to be very at ease about it. It’s definitely helpful in low light settings though. I also like to use mine around the house and to take pics of my family since none of us are very photogenic, the big camera makes a huge difference. The price is another concern too. The lenses are not cheap!
Looks like it was an awesome event! I have a feed linked to FoodBuzz but I’m not really super involved in it, oh well. I do so wish for more food trucks like in LA. One of these days I’m going to go hunt down the cupcake truck!
Being a foodbuzz publisher has a lot of perks, including that they pay you for the ads. If you want to know more about it, you can email me. Yes, cupcake truck! Actually no, probably bad. I have no self control. I’d buy one of everything.
If only I could sleep less and food blog… These free events sure look cool!
Food blogging isn’t that time consuming as one might think. It really varies from blogger to blogger. Some people only post a few times a month. The free events are a lot of fun.
Agreed! I think the food truck gather outside owned our first evening. I’m missing the chicharrones already… I just ate a bag and its not even 10am yet :/
Heehee, we managed to get a bag at the end of the event, and then I forgot about it. I found it last night when I was writing this post and I was staring at it all night.
1) I am now officially jealous of you and you are inspiring me to write my own blog
2) Why can’t SD have something like this!?! Have you been to that SD Food and Wine Festival (I think that’s what it’s called – the tickets are expensive I heard)
3) That must have been so much fun to meet all the other bloggers. Did any of them have normal cameras like the rest of us 🙂
4) The Korean taco on the seaweed looks AMAZING (perhaps this can be your next recipe experiment)
5) Did you go on your own or were you able to invite a friend?
Nice post! Love love love the pics!
(I think on your last blog format, we could still scroll up to look at the pics/reread the blog if we forgot something – is there a way to do that for your new blog format? No biggie – I just open a new page to your blog and do a side by side right now)
Hi Faye,
You should start your own blog! No I haven’t been to the SD Food and Wine because it is so expensive. Not everyone had a big camera, there were many people with normal point and shoot cameras as well. The korean taco was yummy, I’ll probably try making it at some point. You weren’t able to invite friends to this one since it was only free to foodbuzz members. Non foodbuzz members could attend, but for a steep price. I was able to bring BF since he is part of the blog.
You mean when you click on comments, you can no longer see the page? I’m trying to figure out how to fix that. It’s something that got screwed up recently with upgrades, and I have BF looking into it. Hopefully it can be fixed soon.
foodbuzz fest looks like so much fun! i was afraid to trek all the way to SFO from DC without anyone I knew for real over on the west coast. Maybe I’ll go next time, it looks like so much fun!
I think it definitely helps to know people. There were a few people I had talked to enough over twitter and emails that I felt like I would have a lot of fun hanging out with them even though I hadn’t met them in person before. If you don’t know anyone at all, I think it can be overwhelming and it was kind of cliquey.