For me, music festivals are always stamina tests, I walk them with the taste of dust in the mouth, sweat running along my back and a permanent thirst. I barely exaggerate, festivals are always crowded, always happening during hot weather, and I generally barely have time to buy any overpriced food and drinks, so I survive on rice cakes and apples the whole day. As I don’t want to miss anything I end up exhausted and starving, and call me crazy but this is how I have lived every music fest I have ever attended!
Apparently, not everyone shares my die-hard vision of the festival-goer: for the first time, Coachella is offering a four-course $225 meal? What? It is not a joke and it blows my mind. When do you find the time for a four-course dinner when there are 100 bands on the bill? I don’t even remember having a four-course meal ever anyway. According to the LA Times, tickets are already on sale here and the meals are described as ‘family style’, ‘cooked by celebrated Chefs in the beautiful Coachella Rose Garden’, and will include a welcoming cocktail, beer and wine, and food catered by Outstanding in the Field, ‘a roving culinary adventure’. The meal is almost as expensive as the festival entrance so that a dinner with a 3-day GA Festival pass will cost you $600, and a dinner with a 3-day VIP Festival pass will cost you $1024! Ouch, my mortgage budget just took a hit!
‘You don’t have to change the way you eat when you eat at Coachella. If you want to eat at Sugarfish, go to Sugarfish. If you want to eat at Night + Market, go to Night + Market’, declared Coachella founder Paul Tollett to the LA Times. Sugarfish and Night + Market are other restaurants that will be present on the festival site, because this $225 fancy dinner is not the only option for upscale food,… actually there will be dozens of these eateries. Has Coachella morphed into a food festival?
‘There’s just an explosion of great food in Southern California right now’, continues Tollett, ‘With great music we want great food, and we’re always trying to enhance Coachella on all fronts.’ Let me reach out for my rice cakes,… I feel so out of it.
