Taste of Randolph closed Randolph Street from Peoria to Racine from June 19 to 21. It is the street festival for Restaurant Row — the stretch of the West Loop that went from meatpacking and wholesale produce to the most expensive dining strip in the city inside roughly fifteen years.

Who Can Afford the Tent

Here is the question the festival poses without meaning to. A street festival vendor slot has real costs: the fee, the staff, the equipment, the food you may not sell, and three days of pulling people away from your actual dining room. On a strip where rents are what they are on Randolph, the restaurants that can absorb that are the ones already doing well.

Which means the festival is structurally a showcase for the strip’s winners. That is not a criticism of anybody involved, and it is the same dynamic that made Taste of Chicago a chain showcase for forty years before it turned over nearly 38 percent of its vendors this July.

The difference is that Taste is a public festival in a public park with a civic obligation to represent the city. Taste of Randolph represents a commercial district, and the district it represents is genuinely one of the best restaurant strips in America. It is allowed to be exactly what it is.

What Was There Before

Worth remembering what Randolph did for a living. This was the wholesale food district — meat, produce, loading docks, refrigerated trucks at four in the morning. Restaurant Row is built in the shell of the infrastructure that fed the city’s restaurants rather than being one.

That transition happened fast and it displaced businesses that had operated for generations. Some of the purveyors moved out to the suburbs or to Fulton Market’s western edges; some closed. The buildings stayed, the loading bays got glazed, and the neighbourhood now sells thirty-dollar plates where it once sold pallets.

The West Loop also runs the West Loop Art Festival along Fulton in August and Taste of Greektown on Halsted at the end of the same month — three festivals in one summer on a neighbourhood that had almost no residential population twenty-five years ago.

A closed block of Randolph, tents from restaurants that are doing fine, and a very good weekend if you can pay for it. The honest version of the listing includes the second half of that sentence.

Cover image: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)