We arrived at 3:30 on Saturday for a festival that was supposed to end at 8 pm. We purchased tokens ($3 each or 7 for $20). We bought 8 tokens - for every 7 you receive a golden ticket to give to the BBQ team you like most. We stood in a long line for ribs after buying the tokens and noticed that the first place we picked was sold out of ribs. Hours before the festival was to end? We sadly realized that EVERY single place was out of ribs. We showed up mid-day and everyone had sold out already. We each had two chicken samples and two pulled pork samples (one slider, one taco). Food was good, but we were really disappointed that we couldn't try a rib sample from anyone. It was the reason we drove an hour to attend the event.
Most disappointing was that Juicy O's pro BBQ team (and their pulled pork taco) was our favorite, but we couldn't give them our ticket to vote for them for the People's Choice Winner. Meat was tender, juicy, warm, not at all greasy, and the taco with it had yummy BBQ sauce and delicious coleslaw. But the ticket buckets had already been taken to be counted and they didn't know how to get our vote to the counters.
The festival did have a good live band and lots of vendors selling clothing, snacks, jewelry, etc. The same kind of things you see at most festivals or fairs. We almost bought this crunchy corn snack... it came in a great, really spicy habanero flavor - but their credit card scanner wasn't working because they didn't have cell phone reception. I did buy two cute tee shirts for $20 with cats on them from another vendor.
Other BBQ that wasn't competing was being sold, and also the usual food vendors with fried artichokes and similar items - Armadillo Willy's was there (they have a restaurant across the street from Central Park where the festival was held), but they were a cash only booth too so we couldn't even buy ribs (which they still had). We'd spent all our money on the tickets. Adult beverages were available as well. $10 for a commemorative glass with $7 refills of beer. (Wine for sale too.) There were so many teams competing that it was really surprising everyone was out of ribs so early. Perhaps it's grown significantly in popularity, since it sounds like they ran out of ribs last year too and I'm sure they planned ahead to not let that happen again - just not well enough.
Santa Clara isn't very close to Los Angeles, but thanks for the interesting link to SoCal venues. I checked it out!
ReplyDelete