You’re eyeballing Good Taste, a weekly menu for eating in the Bay Area. With Outside Lands returning to Golden Gate Park August 11-13, we checked in with the festival’s food and beverage director Tanya Kollar to find out what she’s excited for this year. (See some of our favorite bites from 2022 here.)
Tanya Kollar has been working with Outside Lands since 2010, and has been the food and beverage director of the festival’s Taste of The Bay Area since 2017. The culinary offerings at Outside Lands are better than any other festival I’ve been to; this year, more than 95 vendors are expected, including previews of new restaurants, pop-ups, food trucks, and emerging independent businesses.
“I think we’re all just kind of obsessed with the Bay Area food scene,” Kollar told me over the phone from the grounds of a festival in Miami that she was working. The doors had just opened and the organizers were feeling good, she said.
“That’s personally my reason for doing all of this is literally an obsession,” she said of the scope of Taste of the Bay Area. “I do festival work for a living, and Outside Lands is the only festival that does it the way that we do it. And it’s so exciting to be a part of that and to just be part of connecting with the restaurants who are the ones that execute all of this, it’s an honor.”
It’s important to Kollar and Outside Lands as a whole that the diversity of offerings grows each year, when there’s around 15-20 new spots available; the rest are filled by returning vendors. She usually starts working on the year’s lineup in January, and had to work a little bit faster this year.
One of her tasks is to help restaurants and vendors that don’t usually make street food come up with something that represents their flavors and standards and translates to consumption in the foggy Polo Field.
“A lot of the conversations that I have, especially with the restaurants that have never done this before, is how are we going to take your menu and present it in a format that makes sense for a festival and how are we going to make it portable and how are we going to make it less messy and something that is going to be really easy to enjoy on the go?”
Newcomers to Outside Lands this year include the La Cocina Taco Tour, featuring young businesses Alma y Sazon, Bocadito Colombian Snackeria, and Clandestina Cocina; food from Moon, the forthcoming casual restaurant by the fancy Sorrel; Taiwanese bites from Piglet & Co; smoked meats from Horn Barbecue; and vegan froyo from the FroGo truck.
Sometimes, the eating strategy comes down to which lines are the shortest, but I asked Kollar what she was most looking forward to having when she gets there this year, in case that might inform your weekend plans.
“This year I am really excited,” she said. “I am a big fan of Korean corn dogs, it’s like my favorite junk food and we’ve got Stix doing Korean corn dogs this year. Tortas from My Friend Fernando — they’re a pop-up in the Bay Area, and they are just so polished and refined. You think of Tortas as something more basic and they just go so beyond that. And they make these incredible, incredible dishes that are portable and also full of so much flavor.
“We’ve got Kaiyō, they are Nikkei-Peruvian, which is Peruvian Japanese cuisine. They’re doing Peruvian skewers over rice. They’re also doing chicken karaage, so they’re doing some really great snacky comfort food things. Shuggie’s Trash Pie I’m super excited about this year. I love their restaurant, they’re so trendy. They’re coming out and doing their pizza and they’ve got really fun flavors. One of them is their Chedda and Feta pizza, which I’m super excited to try.
“Parche is another one. They are doing Colombian arepas and they are also doing loaded Yuca fries with chicharrones, so that’s going to be amazing. We’ve actually got two soups on the menu this year I’m stoked about. Bodega SF is doing a Bo Kho soup. It’s a Vietnamese short rib stew, which I think is going to be super comforting and filling, and for those cold nights it’s going to be perfect. And then also Abacá, our Filipino restaurant, they’ve been with us for three years now, they are doing a dumpling molo soup. It’s shrimp and chicken dumplings. Honestly at eight or nine o’clock at night, that’s exactly what I want.”
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