People who haven’t been to Outside Lands don’t always believe me when I say it’s the music festival with the best food anywhere that I’ve been. It makes eating at other music festivals almost always a letdown, so I wait all year for the deeply appreciated privilege to cover the food scene in Golden Gate Park again.
Outside Lands’ Taste of the Bay Area presents a globally minded mix of almost 100 street food vendors, restaurants, pop-ups, and future concepts, and one of the best plates I had among many was from a restaurant coming soon to San Francisco. After opening a second space in the Hyatt Place Hotel earlier this year, the original location of KAIYŌ restaurant in Cow Hollow is being converted into KAIYŌ Handroll Bar (1838 Union Street, SF). I don’t usually crave sushi in the foggy cold of this festival, but having been invited to both of the restaurants in the hotel and experiencing high-quality and visually beautiful meals, I was excited to get a first taste of these handrolls: yellowtail, fried shrimp and raw tuna, and salmon with crunchy quinoa.
Prices are high in general here, but a handful of vendors offered some extra ritzy dishes in limited quantities that mostly sold out in the first hour or two each afternoon of the three-day event. While waiting for a trio of what turned out to be some primally good smashburger tacos from Copas, a former restaurant on Market Street in San Francisco, we saw a nurse order a $60 Wagyu steak quesadilla rained down upon with truffles. No one in the food area looked happier all day. I’ll admit that I tried, but failed, to get a $48 slice of Basque cheesecake topped with caviar and truffles from Sorrel (3228 Sacramento St., SF), but am happy to have the cash now that it’s Monday and the food intoxication is wearing off.
There was also a new $20 extra pass called Bites of the Bay that could be purchased onsite that allowed access to buy additional off-menu, snack-sized items. Participating vendors had a special logo on their booth so they could be easily found. This was a smart new option for the sizeable sector of attendees who love to focus on the food as a sport and score all the “secret” and limited edition items, although the presence of an overall younger crowd had one food vendor admitting that their sales weren’t as robust as in years past.
Cooking portable food for thousands of people has to be a huge feat, and four restaurants in particular deserve special salutes for making ideal festival meals that were portable, shareable, storeable (in case you wanted a bite later), flavorful, and not messy at all: the falafel wraps from Oakland’s Shawarmaji (2100 Franklin Street, Oakland), the quartered and fat pita’d Arayes Mediterranean burgers by Dalida (101 Montgomery, SF), and the Swedish hot dogs from San Francisco’s Kantine (1906 Market St, SF); the latter, with pink Bay shrimp salad, and mashed potatoes, was so fun and novel. And the hush puppy jalapeño corndog with red remoulade by Sandy’s (1457 Haight, SF has ruined me for all future corndogs, because it was simply perfect.
It seemed only right to nibble on Bohemian Creamery’s Girl Dinner of Castelvetrano olives, cheeses, seed crackers, and strawberry jam during Chappell Roan’s shoulda-been-headlining set at 4pm on Sunday. We were sold even before we found out that one cheese had an espresso rind for a mid-afternoon Pink Pony Club pick-me-up. I might be becoming a woman at my current middle-age, because I didn’t subsist on 80% desserts over the weekend, just some strategically placed cups of Charles Chocolates drinking chocolate, a neat banoffee coffee from Ayesha Curry’s Sweet July, and a classic Kantine cardamom bun.
Outside Lands can be a huge testing ground for the viability of dishes that aren’t on a restaurant’s menu, and sometimes the hits earn a permanent place in the everyday lineup. After I posted a picture of gumbo queso fries with fried shrimp, an off-menu dish that Chef Dontaye Ball of Gumbo Social (5176 Third Street, SF) created for his Instagram followers going to the festival to ask for, another local chef made a plea to Ball.
“We need that on their regular menu at the store in Bayview,” commented D of Smokin D’s BBQ, a takeout restaurant that’s now soft-open at 2181 Irving Street in the Sunset. (We were proud to be the first to write about this barbecue master when he launched the business as a cottage operation in his garage in 2021.)
“It’s possible,” replied Ball. Here’s hoping!
Like Gumbo Social, Saigon Sandwich (560 Larkin Street, SF) was a newcomer to Outside Lands this year, and the restaurant created a special item to sell alongside banh mi just for the event: loaded banh mi fries, with all the elements you’d find in a sandwich. The permanent menu has 13 banh mi to choose from, but we’d love to see the fries on there, too, if we’re allowed to daydream, because it’s a combo that really works.
Thank you to Outside Lands’ food and beverage director Tanya Kollar for continually improving on what’s got to be the best music festival eating choices in the country. In our interview last year, Kollar admitted that it’s a literal obsession to put this together well. With 94% of the food vendors being POC and women, it’s also a clear labor of love and thoughtfulness about truly representing the Bay Area. For more, check out everything we ate at Outside Lands with commentary on my Instagram feed.
Tamara just started a free newsletter for California Eating.
