The Bay Area’s big Labor Day weekend street fair will be Sunday’s fourth annual Bizerkeley Food Fest, with samples and delicious dishes galore of eats “made by vegans for a meat eater's tastebuds.”
The cancellation of this year’s Hiero Day took out the Bay Area’s biggest Labor Day weekend street festival. But there will be heaping helpings of East Bay street fair delights on Sunday, when “Northern California's largest vegan gathering” the fourth annual Bizerkeley Food Fest gobbles up 100,000 square feet of Downtown Berkeley. Nearly 100 food vendors will be serving samples and dishes of vegan food designed to satisfy even the most passionate meat and dairy lovers.
“My goal was always to find meat-eater approved vegan food that anyone, no matter what your diet or background was, could enjoy,” organizer Erika Hazel, aka the Bizerkeley Vegan tells SFist. “This is a curated festival. People don’t get to just sign up and be there. They have to be hand-selected or nominated.”
The Vegan Hood Chefs will of course be on hand, as well as Chef J. Redd with his vegan shrimp po'boy fried sushi roll, and Srey Vegan’s Cambodian pineapple walnut shrimp dish seen above, a remarkable version of imitation shrimp.
“It’s like ‘You can’t believe it’s not butter,’” Hazel tells us. “You can't believe it’s vegan.”
Tickets are just $9, with discounts for couples and families.
“We do our best to give away over 1,000 door prizes to our first one thousand or so guests,” she adds. “We’ve gotten amazing donations from local Bay Area companies like Mellody and Impossible Foods, and we have a ton of coupons and cool food things to give away.”
Vendors will be selling full plates, but you can also indulge in dozens of samples. There will be plant-based deli slices from Berkeley purveyor Prime Roots, who were recently featured on Netflix’s You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, among many others.
And yes there will be an alcohol zone with beer, wine, and Dr. Hops hard kombucha.
Also there will be plenty to do for kids, with a game zone, bounce house, giant Jenga, and a petting zoo of adoptable pitbull puppies. You’ll also find a silent auction for benefiting Herd and Flock Animal Sanctuary, as the Bizerkeley Food Fest has raised $8,000 for animal rights causes over its first three years.
And to fill that Hiero Day void, this will also be a full-day music concert. Highlights will include Oakland hip-hop ensemble Audiopharmacy, and your headliner is SF rapper Stunnaman02. He'll perform his hit “Eat a Salad,” which is very vulgar, but still fundamentally a song about the value of eating vegetables.
“He’ll be performing the clean version of that,” Hazel says. And for the fourth annual Bizerkeley Food Fest, she adds, “Come with an open mind and empty stomach.”
The 2024 Bizerkeley Food Fest is Sunday, September 1, 12-6 pm at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park at 2151 Martin Luther King Jr Way in Berkeley ($9, $14 the day of the event) Tickets here
Related: Bay Area-Based Impossible Foods Unveils Plant-Based 'Impossible Pork' [SFist]
Image courtesy Visionary Media Collective
