Eat Real is Oakland's annual food festival, held in Jack London Square, a bipolar part of the town that seems half bourgeoisie wharf area with expensive restaurants and new condos, and half sketchy warehouses and dive bars. Not somewhere I frequent, but one weekend a year I pass the looming local jail, walk under the freeway, and through the blocks of overpriced, empty condo buildings to get to the tightly packed foodie frenzy known as Eat Real.
The Bay Area gets its summers late; June, July, and August are mostly marked by the dense layers of fog that roll in off the Pacific, pulled inland by the heat of the Central Valley. As the rest of the state cools down, the fog withdraws, making September often our warmest month. So wandering around in public with a jar full of beer feels particularly glorious in the lovely, sunny, perfectly temperate climate.
It was so enjoyable in fact, that I didn't pick up my camera again until the jar was nearly empty and the Green Guys had opened their new Eritrean-Irish food truck, serving out a huge portion of doro wot, injera, and salad.
And even though I split it (with Ben, on a work trip from Philadelphia, who shares an appreciation and capacity for good food) some serious recovery time was needed before the next food truck foray. So we watched Chef John Fink of The Whole Beast carve up a roasted lamb.
An aside: a good, but rarely utilized marketing strategy is to decorate your bad-ass sign with drippings.
The jars were empty, so we headed over to the "Jam Bar," a misleading name designed to trick people into drinking cocktails. Ben got a really excellent grilled watermelon and basil-infused vodka thing from Wood Tavern, and Robyn and I shared something with rye in it, which was also pretty good.
The huge paella booth from last year was gone, but Venga Paella brought it with a rich, wet, seafood paella that was so good it didn't even matter that it was a bit on the salty side. It probably made it taste even more like the sea.
Friday, the first day of the three-day festival, is the day for ice cream vendors. I'm actually very familiar with the ice cream people in the Bay Area, and so I didn't brave the lines for Scream Sorbet or Nieves Cinco de Mayo. There was a brief moment, however, when Ici Ice Cream – an Alice Waters influenced ice cream venture – had just a few people in front of their booth. The line for their College Avenue storefront is usually down the block, so I jumped at the change to buy one of their ginger cookie and meyer lemon ice cream sandwiches in under twenty minutes. It was so phenomenal that i saved the ingredients list, just so I can try to recreate it at home. But I'm not optimistic; Ici goes above and beyond rational expectations for their product.
The only thing that could have possibly surpassed the taste of that ice cream would have to be an astounding, utterly life-changing, and deeply moving event. Like these shoes. And that was Friday.
Saturday evening I went back to the festival for dinner, starting off with a lovely rice and chicken dish from Soliel's and some absolutely amazing beignet de banana, which is French-African for "delicious fried sugary things with bananas in them that you just ruined your appetite for dinner with."
I've eaten beignets, and I've had a lot of fried bananas in my time, but these were so fresh and so good that I'd consider going to Soleil's restaurant just to eat them by the plate. For real. I even ate the one that fell on the nasty-ass ground, because it hurt too much to waste.
Then I got a bacon-studded hot dog on a stick from 4505 Meats, just for the novelty of meat-on-a-stick. It was pretty tasty.
And then, as the sun went down, we hung out with the hippies by the bread oven, who were super awesome and helped us figure out how to build one in my boyfriend's backyard.
And then we tried some plum-jalapeño gelato from Gelateria Naia, which was almost as good as my vanilla-habañero ice cream, and I bought a Rickey Henderson t-shirt from 57-33, and we went home.
But not before we saw a piglet humping a cabbage.
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