San Francisco Street Food Festival

Our first San Francisco Street Food Festival started as an idea for a block party. A single city block, on Folsom Street, in the heart of the Mission, where the talented chefs of La Cocina would cook outside and alongside some of the most heralded chefs in the Bay Area, if not the country. If there were no logos, we thought, and all chefs had the same challenges, well, then let the food speak for itself. We would stand in opposition to mediocre food festivals across the country. We would prove that the chefs inside of La Cocina—who, at that time, struggled to gain entry to farmers’ markets and other events—could not just compete with but could outperform their better-known peers. So we printed fliers, knocked on doors and made it up as we went along. Five years later, we’d occupy a mile of space, host one hundred vendors and one hundred thousand guests for what CNN called the “best food festival in America.”