Transforming a restaurant into a three-day food stall is quite the experience. Acting as a food vendor comes with, yes, setting up and breaking down a booth, but it also requires plenty of forethought and planning to keep things running smoothly. Bagel shop Wise Sons was a vendor at Outside Lands from 2015 to 2019, and after a pause, owner Evan Bloom brought his business back to the festival circuit for the three-day Dead & Company concert series in Golden Gate Park, August 1-3.
If you’ve ever been curious about the experience of running a food booth at a music festival, Bloom discusses how he prepares for three days of selling food ahead of Outside Lands. It’s not an exact 1:1 comparison, but he sheds some light on working at large, three-day festivals, in his own words.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It’s a lot of guessing. We have no idea what the festival is gonna bring. We know that it was sold out. We know that’s 60,000 people a night across three nights. What we don’t know is what other businesses are gonna be there. What are they gonna be selling? You want to hedge, because you don’t want to sell out, but you also don’t want to have a bunch of product that goes in the trash [or gets donated]. The margins are actually pretty thin.
I’m thinking about the things that require the least amount of prep and that are going to keep in the walk-in for a couple days, because, ideally, we’re loading everything in on Thursday. What’s gonna lend itself best to being produced quickly, but then also sit for a few minutes because you want to be ahead of orders. You don’t want people waiting.
We know that pastrami is going to be a top seller. We also know that something hot is good, because the festival is at Golden Gate Park in the summer. It’s going to be cold, you [want] gooey, melty cheese. So we know that a Reuben is one of our top sellers. We know that it’s a meal. How we do the Reuben at festivals is that we don’t deal with plates or paper boats. We wrap it in paper. And I love that it stays warm. You can stick it in your bag. You can stick it in your pocket.
The first day of the festival
I didn’t sleep Wednesday or Thursday night because I was so nervous, running scenarios — will people show up? Will I be ready on time? So you wake up Friday morning, and in this case, we forgot some stuff, so we had to arrive early at the festival. We went to our restaurant, picked up a bunch of stuff, filled up on coffee, got in the U-Haul, and did the whole roundabout drive into the festival, which takes forever. You’re turning everything on, hoping it all heats up, health inspection, and you’re waiting for them to open the gates.
I started my day at 8 a.m. on Friday, but I’m not done until midnight. The festival closes at 10 p.m. You have to sell until the music stops, and then you’ve got to deal with clean up, making sure everything’s not going to blow away overnight, and washing your dishes because there’s no real dishwasher, taking inventory, making sure you don’t need anything. You’re checking propane, making sure everything’s set up for the next day, paying people out for work, and throwing everything in a backpack and hoofing it to wherever your car is, which is never close. I didn’t really go anywhere on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, and I walked at least 10 miles every day. I brought clogs for cooking, and then I brought sneakers for going back and forth.
And then I’m dropping all my staff off, because I don’t want anybody to have to deal with Ubers. I have a car, so I’m doing the rounds afterwards, and that takes another 45 minutes to an hour.
You’re basically waiting. All of a sudden, you look up and there are two long lines, and you’re just like, is this gonna be the rush? For anybody who’s worked in a restaurant, there’s this adrenaline of seeing a full board of tickets and just pumping out food, and it’s awesome, and we’re all hollering at each other and feeding off each other. I like to line my food right down the middle of the tent because I think it’s great for an assembly line, makes it easier to get to the front. But also because I like my staff looking at each other, because why work this festival if you’re not going to have fun and be social? They’re talking and have a good time. They’re pushing each other. We’re one of the only booths that does it that way.
During our busiest hour, we sold $3,000 in food, which would equate to, roughly, probably 175 like covers, in an hour, which is a lot. Two and a half per minute. This is when you’re just keeping food going as fast as you can go. Everything, just go, go, go. No modifications, sorry, everything comes the way it comes.
Setting up and breaking down
The amount of work that it takes — we’re putting in a 12-hour day on Thursday just to get everything set up and picked up. The same on Monday, when everybody’s gone, the place is trashed. We’ve got to show up early in the morning and pick everything up, and it’s all covered and dirty, and you’ve got to come back and wash dishes.
Things can go wrong; we picked up a rental griddle, we took it to the park, and it fell in the truck during transport. When we went to turn it on Friday, it didn’t work. So we were down a griddle on Friday. Then we were down a fryer as well. We couldn’t figure it out, our fryer is not working. One’s working, one’s not. So I was able to get a tech out Saturday morning, which means I would have to get up early, coordinate with the festival.
Do food vendors make money?
What I always told people in the past is, it’s great marketing, really good name recognition. It’s good to be out there with your fans, make new fans, have fun for your team. Don’t do it if you’re not going to be able to have fun yourself. You can make money, [but] I wouldn’t go in expecting that you’re going to make a ton of money. Listen, you could go really low quality and charge a lot. I’m sure there are ways to milk it for more money. You could hire less people, whatever it is. But, people that go in thinking this is going to make my month or make my quarter, they tend to be disappointed. But especially when we did it as a young business, the first time we did [a festival], it was huge for us.
[The payoff is] team cohesion — you can’t undersell it. I don’t normally work in the stores anymore, I’m in and out, I’m not doing physical labor. But to be there, making sure things are high quality, doing the same tasks everybody else is doing, and showing that you care and having real conversations, that’s huge. I think we’ll come out of it stronger because we spent more time together getting through this.
Dining and Cooking