About Last Night: Feastival 2012


As most of you know, Feastival was last night. And if the crowds in attendance were any indication, most of you were actually there. We certainly were. We had the entire team assembled to eat (and drink) our way through the event–ostensibly so we could tell you all about it today, but really just because we all wanted to hang out for a while and get fed by what basically shook down as nearly all the best restaurants in the city.

It was a great night. A great party. It had none of last year’s glitches or weird old-money vibe (though there was certainly a whiff of that when it came time for the tens of thousands of dollars in auction items being sold off), and was full of excellent food, naked people, dancing, acrobats, bourbon, more bourbon, salmon (so much salmon…), music, flashy lights and dedicated grubniks going bonkers for the meatballs and pork belly.

COOK‘s (and Feastival’s) official photographer, Yoni Nimrod, was there as well and, once again, has favored us with a few snaps.

The highlights? Rabbit agnolotti from Le Virtu. The heavy pours from the lonely dudes manning the Devil’s Cut table. Jeremy Nolen from Brauhaus Schmitz turning people on to liverwurst by making it out of foie gras and touching it with a little bit of fruit. Dandelion had a rillette that I just couldn’t stop eating. Intern Aubrey was haunting the Percy Street table eating brisket and sauerkraut sandwiches. Art was all over Matyson‘s smoked salmon with quinoa and the scallop noodles at Ela (which, quite frankly, I’m surprised Jason Cichonski was able to keep on the table since he seemed to spend most of the night acting like a very handsome black hole whose gravity only attracted ladies) while the inimitable Fidel Gastro one-upped Matyson’s salmon and could occasionally be found stuffing his cheeks with the lamb and kale meatballs from Talula’s Garden like some kind of foul-mouthed and drunken chipmunk.

The big surprise of the night? The liquid corn ravioli with chocolate salt from Marigold Kitchen. Not because Marigold isn’t a good restaurant, but because it’s one of those places that we always seem to forget is there. The hazard of being great all the time, I guess. If you never do anything awful or shameful or strange to attract the notice of the working food press, you can sometimes get overlooked for those places which do.

In any event, we’re not going to overlook Marigold anymore. And I think we’ll be spending a bit of time in the next week or so looking over our budgets to see if we can afford to hire the half-naked acrobats come to perform daily at Foobooz World HQ. Because that’s WAY more useful than getting our own helicopter.

We’re hoping to have more pictures before the end of the day, so stay tuned…