Wanna Taste?

The Taste of St. Louis was yesterday. Being a big fan of Chicago's taste and never having missed one when living there, I wanted to check out what St. Louis could do. I read somewhere that somebody (maybe Midwest Living Mag) rated this event the #1 Taste of event, ranking the huge Chicago event third.

First of all, this is not Chicago's taste, not even in the same class, maybe they paid off the magazine, who knows. I think it was a smart move to have this event in October, when the average temp is 75 and not 105, and having it downtown instead of Forest Park was also smart (and more convenient for us). Also, NO TICKETS! Cash was king.

There was a restaurant row of about 30 choices, which unfortunately leaned heavy on Italian dishes. I can only have so many toasted raviolis. I would have liked to have seen more ethnic places; we have a sizeable Vietnamese and Bosnian population here, yet no restaurant representation at the taste. Interestingly, there were several chain restaurants like California Pizza Kitchen. Pass. The wind had picked up real fall-like by the time we got there, killing any kind of hunger just to stay warm. What we ended up getting: crab rangoons, black bean empanadas, a smoked turkey leg, and a turtle funnel cake. Nothing too earth shattering there; at the Chicago taste, I get African goat rice and crap like that. No restaurant really offered a "taste" portion, so we filled up quite quickly.

There were two stages of music, which were ok. I guess Sister Hazel was headlining Saturday night-if they were any good-It's Hard to Say. There was the obligatory collection of small booths selling crap that makes you wonder, "who the hell buys this shit?"

The oddest part about the whole taste was their go green initiative EGS. They wanted you to place the compostable containers in one place, recycling in another. The organizes did make it easy by having all of the containers and service utensils compostable. I have no problem with all that. What was odd: THEY ONLY HAD CANS AT THE STREET CORNERS. Which made three total. I had to hunt and hunt for one of these cans and even asked someone who was serving food and even they had no idea where they were. I would be very very curious to know how many of those cardboard containers and forks ended up on the ground yesterday.

Will I be back? Not sure. We were entertained a few hours on a Saturday afternoon but the wallet was lightened quite a bit.