The Best foods at San Francisco’s Outside Lands
San Francisco is a food lovers paradise with lots of great food options in restaurants, pop up markets and food trucks so it should be no surprise that Outside Lands, an annual music festival in Golden Gate Park, is full of amazing food and drink options that go way beyond traditional festival food.
Sure you can get a beer and french fries but you can also get handcrafted cocktails from some of San Francisco’s best known mixologists or high end wine in Wine Lands from a diverse selection of local and international wineries. You can find lobster roll sandwiches, oysters, cheese plates, hand crafted sausages, wood fired pizzas and a plethora of ethnic foods from Indian to Mexican to Venezuelan.
Outside Lands offers a whole area dedicated to wine, another dedicated to beer and there are also areas dedicated to chocolate and bacon. This year for the first time there was also a stage where as part of what was billed Gastro Magic, chefs were matched up with DJs, dancers and singers to create dishes while accompanied by live performances. One of these performances included Brandon Jew of Bar Agricole making duck sauce while NY based DJ Duck Sauce spun some tunes and costumed ducks danced on stage.
The most note worthy foods on offer that I had the chance to taste were the following:
The doughnut cheese burger with tater tots from Straw SF is a beef burger topped with cheese placed between 2 full sized glazed donuts. This probably accounts for more than a full serving of calories for an entire day but you know what they say, go big or go home!
Curry Up Now served a deconstructed beef samosa with great flavor and spice which reminded me of samosas I had while traveling in India.
The Rib Whip made a tasty Carolina pulled pork sandwich with cole slaw pickles and tantalizing barbeque sauce reminiscent of the South
Pica Pica served crispy yucca chips, fried plantains and an arrepa which is fried cornmeal flat bread crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside cut in half and stuffed with pork and scrumptious avocado based guasaca sauce, making me want to take a trip to Venezuela.
The 4505 Meat burger made with grass fed dry aged beef from Magruder Farms on a house made sesame scallion bun with gruyer cheese, lettuce and special sauce was perfectly cooked and was accompanied by chimichurri french fries highlighting the difference that high end freshly butchered meat can make in a burger
All of these options show just how lucky we are to live in SF and demonstrate that even in the middle of a field on camp stoves great dishes can be created and enjoyed!
If you did not have the chance to try the dishes listed above, be sure to try them at next year’s Outside Lands. If you don’t want to wait a whole year though, seek out the restaurants and food trucks listed above and give the dishes a try, trust me, you’ll be glad you did!
What was your favorite dish at Outside Lands?
Tags: 4505 Meat, Bar Agricole, Brandon Jew, Curry Up, Duck Sauce DJ, Food Trucks, Magruder Farms, Outside Lands, Pica Pica, San Francisco, Straw, The Rib Whip, wine
