Taste of Chicago ran July 8 through 12 in Grant Park, free to enter and pay-per-bite, its forty-sixth year. Day one alone drew about 250,000 people, described by everyone covering it as a large and entirely peaceful crowd. Eighty Chicago restaurants took part, and nearly 38 percent of them were first-time participants.
That last figure is the story and almost nobody led on it. A 46-year-old civic institution replacing close to two in five of its vendors in a single year is not a food festival detail, it is evidence that the thing has been deliberately rebuilt.
What Turnover at That Rate Means
For most of its history Taste was reliably criticised as a showcase for large operations that could absorb the cost of a five-day tent — the pizza chains, the cheesecake company, the caterers. Getting a small independent kitchen onto that lawn was famously difficult.
Thirty-eight percent first-timers indicates somebody changed the selection process, the cost structure, or both. The range on offer reflected it: the festival's own guide highlighted Senegalese cooking and Argentine-style empanadas alongside the institutions — Connie’s Pizza, Eli’s Cheesecake, Harold’s Chicken.
Having Harold’s and a Senegalese kitchen in the same footprint is a better description of how Chicago eats than anything the festival managed in its first four decades.
The Identity Crisis Is a Music Question
The free nightly main stage carried Beach Bunny, Original Koffee, Common, Babyface and Julieta Venegas. Mayor Brandon Johnson said from that stage that the Taste was back in July, where it belongs.
Common and Babyface performing free in Grant Park at a food festival raises a fair question about what this event now is. That is a bill that would sell a ticketed night on its own, and Beach Bunny — a Chicago band — playing the city’s most establishment event is its own small milestone.
The generous reading is that a free food festival with a genuinely good music programme is simply a good deal for residents. The sceptical reading is that Taste has spent years unsure whether it is a restaurant showcase or a concert series, and solves it annually by being both without committing to either.
It also ran the exact same five days as Windy City Smokeout in the United Center lot, which the weekend listing and others noted without much comment. Two vast food events, four miles apart, on identical dates.
A quarter of a million people on a Wednesday, eighty kitchens, and thirty of them there for the first time. Whatever else Taste is unsure about, it has stopped being a fixed list.
Cover image: Courtesy Choose Chicago