Outside Lands Field Report: Day 1
Friday marked the first of three action-packed days in Golden Gate Park for the annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival. Yum Blog was on location scouting out the best of the fest so that you know what to hit up and what to avoid to make the most out of this exciting weekend.
You’d be crazy to miss:
Flour + Water’s Salumeria. This new, much-hyped SF eatery has it’s own booth at Outside Lands, offering slow-cooked porchetta sandwiches with an ideal melding of salty and savory tones, offering a melt-in-your-mouth deliciousness.
4505 Meats was crushing it with their sinfully-delightful cheeseburgers and oversized grilled sausages. The beef patties–with a fat content of around 30%–are fried to order on the griddle, topped with melted gruyere and a secret sort of aioli and then sandwiched between a house made sesame-seed coated brioche. The end result is revelatory: somewhat like an In-N-Out style burger, only on gourmet-enhancing drugs. Andalu also blew my mind with the crispy goodness and innovative flair of their breaded and fried mac-n cheese sticks.
Split Pea Seduction offers a collection of warm and filling soups that were mighty fine to me on a cold, damp day in the park. They also warmed things up, of course, with a massive slab of meat roasting on a spit.
Q Restaurant and Wine Bar was serving up their famous crispy-fried tater tots with a trifecta of sauces, including a bacon-topped, blue cheese dip that must certainly be illegal in most states east of California.
In every instance, the most appealing boothes were wholly dedicated to intense preparation. Knowledgeable chefs came onto the scene with a bevy of perfectly engineered ingredients and flavors so that the end result was every bit as impressive as if it had been prepared in a full-on kitchen.
Try to stay away from places that appear to have pre-prepared food sitting around. That may fly at a normal festival, but at Outside Lands–with so much high-end, local gourmet available–there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to enjoy a delicious meal crafted just for you.
