Good Taste shows you where to stick your fork in the Bay! This week, peruse a fresh-from-the-field dispatch on Outside Lands 2026’s Taste of the Bay Area from a 17-time festival food pornographer.
Morning amplification
Powering through a three-day festival that’s expected to draw a total of 225,000 people requires extra fuel. Luckily, the Bay Area is having an especially big boom of coffee, tea, and pastries right now—to the extent that DJs such as myself want coffee gigs instead of club gigs. Our favorite Outside Lands weekend breakfasts were the cardamom-brewed iced coffees by Oakland’s Shawarmaji and Reem’s and a smartly shareable egg puff waffle ice cream sundae with boba by Little Sweet, who I really should have shouted out in my recent column about hojicha, because their strawberry hojicha latte was divine.
My friends and I witnessed and shared in the exciting adventure of locating the new pastry carts in the park. As a fan of the weekly Tano pop-up as well as the Ferry Building’s new hit Parachute Bakery, they both received the most money from the Good Taste team. (Disclosure: We spent a lot, but were also given quite a few wonderful items from chefs we wanted to feature and from Another Planet coupons.)
The humid fog wasn’t kind to the items made with laminated dough, but that just meant we ate more of the high-quality fruit fillings. Parachute’s incredible mango tapioca and Basque cheesecake as well as Tano’s signature salt bread and fest special, a well-glazed crab rangoon kouign-amann, survived Karl and his cold and windy elements best.
Team work, dream work
Culinary team work made a big impression over the weekend. It’s a brilliant gift to be able to observe the behind the house operations of the almost 100 vendors who served food and drinks at Outside Lands this year. The prep, the choreography, the grace under pressure, the yummy trades with their neighbors! I hope it was as fun as it looked for most of the tireless staff who I got to observe. Watching sister restaurants Arquet and Sorrel prepare thousands of lobster rolls and fried chicken sandwiches was especially impressive.
Taste of the Bay Area curator Tanya Kollar highlighted several collaborative concepts that made weekend-only menus just for this year. The three that I tried all served some of my favorite bites: a lamb quesabirria with sesame and chili consomé from Reem’s x Lion Dance Cafe, a lavash-wrapped vegan weenie from Oakland’s Jaji x TallBoy, and the full menu from Wise Sons Delicatessen x Outta Sight Pizza, including pickle lemonade, a much-vaunted sesame pizza bagel with chili crisp ranch, a pastrami dip sandwich, and cacio e pepe fries. I usually think I don’t like pickles, but now I know I love pickle lemonade.
Myself and my friends in the press tent who got to sample it all would love to heartily thank Wise Sons, Outta Sight, and 3 Bottled Fish chef and owner Paulette Tran for preparing them for us to devour! Team work makes the prices work for the indie freelance team!
Black power
Black American, African, and Afro-Latino chefs truly shined and stood out from the crowd, and it’s crucial to point out how many stellar Black chefs who are really making noise in the Bay right now. My highlights included the whole fish, plantain, and jollof rice plate from the Jollof Kitchen food truck, Dontaye Ball’s outlandishly large and crispy filet of fish sandwich at Gumbo Social, and the duck fat fried and oxtail-topped yuca fries by first-time vendor Meski, the Ethiopian-Dominican restaurant in San Francisco from Chef Nelson German and Draymond Green.
I was lucky to have some time to eat a Charles Chocolates brownie sundae with Chef Ball and learned that he made pickles from 100 pounds of produce that Florence Fang Community Farm in Bayview was going to have to compost otherwise. He also mentioned that he thought about kids not eating all day or just having one item for the day and forwent pricing his items as much as he really needed to in order to offer something substantial and shareable. Case in point: our team of four went to town on that filet of fish after filming it!
High + low
Taste of the Bay Area is an expensive pursuit, but this year, they worked with several vendors to offer snack-sized items as a new feature to offset the unreal prices that have popped up on many main menus. At the top of participating booths there was an extra snack icon to indicate a lower-priced selection available, but I’m not sure the word got out about this en masse, and the snacks were not listed on the printed menus. One vendor I asked said they didn’t sell many of their snack, which was a half-sized portion of one of their main menu items.
I saw lots of kids splitting giant $4 pickles from Wise Sons x Outta Sight, and many olds chomping down on petite $33 caviar-crowned corndogs from the Caviar Co. in Wine Lands, so people could actually splurge or not spend too much. Thank you to the Caviar Co. and Another Planet for the gift of a caviar corndog, which was smartly engineered to maintain its textures after I took three million pictures of it. Like the weekend itself, the opulent experience was a dream sequence.
