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Saturday's Great American Food and Music Festival looked like it had win written all over it: Diners, Drive-ins and Dives' Guy Fieri, alpha-male grilling fanboy Bobby Flay! A16's Nate Appleman! Boulevard's Nancy Oakes! LA's Pink’s Hot Dogs!, Tony Luke's Cheesesteaks! Booze! Jazzy tunes! Sun!
However, according to the unfortunate folks who attended Saturday's food and easy-listening gathering at Shoreline Amphitheater (who vented about the long lines, lack of food, computer snafus, and drink ticket nonsense) the event was, well, a shitshow.
For example, there's this:
"Jeez! A class of pre-schoolers could have done a better job organizing this festival than the producers: Serious Eats and The Agency Group.. If this event had happened in Japan, the head organizers (that's you, SeriousEats.com!!!) would have already committed suicide, and that's with 4 hours still left in the event (not suggesting that the festival organizers need to take such drastic measures)."
"...this was a crazy bad event. (which i had been looking forward to since it was first blogged about on serious eats.) i have never had such an atrocious experience at any public venue previously -- and i mean never."
And another:
"I signed up for seriouseats.com for the sole purpose of expressing my disgust with the shoddy, unprofessional, nightmare that was the "Great American Food and Music Fest." There was nothing, "Great," no "food," no "fest" and the only "music" I heard was the sound of 20,000 people cursing their miserable lives. Just to reiterate, I had one of the worst experiences of my life today."
Oh, and marital bliss was jeopardized:
"On a personal note. My husband and I don't get to spend much alone time together. We picked your event to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I had been looking forward to this event for months. Thank God, we left early enough to salvage our day and still have some good food (that we cooked at home). It's too bad, all the people affected can't get refunds for the hours of their lives wasted standing in lines that never moved."
Children were forced to spend the weekend doing arithmetic:
"My own ten year old son did the math---if even just 8,000 people showed up for the event, evenly spaced over 8 hours, that's still 1,000 people, having only 22 booths to go to. That means in one hour, there are at least 45 people waiting to be served at each booth, and it takes a minute to serve."
Too bad since SeriousEats is a nifty site. Anyway, here's the official apology. Better luck next time, guys.
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whatta surprise ... what was the first clue this was gonna go wrong? perhaps Little Feet as a headliner? Their genius leader, the late great Lowell George has been dead for what, 20 years?
Lowell will have been dead for THIRTY years this June 29th. Little Feat is still a great band and has been for many of those thirty years.
Too bad they couldn't pull this together- sounds like they didn't anticipate a large walk-up crowd or the 8000 tickets selling the week of the event. I'd considered going, now am glad I decided against it.
Still miss the "New Orleans by the Bay" events they used to have at Shoreline. Now *that* was a successful venture involving food, music, and drinks.
Any big event that happens at Shoreline is guaranteed to be a "shitshow." Just go to Ozzfest or whatever and see what I mean.