Post of the taste

Taste of Chicago. One of the bigger Chicago events that occurs every year with something like 3.2 million people passing through the week long event. If you aren't familiar, let me fill you in. Every year the city of Chicago hosts a feeding frenzy in Grant Park. Columbus Drive is shut down, and something like 70 booths of restaurants are set up. In order to buy food though, you don't use cash. You buy tickets. So, for $8 you get 12 tickets. A sandwich will run you 8-9 tickets (about $6, which isn't horrible).

There's a couple problems, as far as I can tell with Taste of Chicago. First, it's open. You don't pay admission, or have to buy tickets. You can walk through the area. Well, okay, so it may be a park, but there are bunch of kids, riff-raff, and ne'er-do-wells that would be eliminated if they made you buy tickets as a form of admission. If you aren't there to eat (and you might be going to see music at one end or the other) then you might be there to make trouble. Which I think some folks were. Don't get me wrong. If you are leaving the Taste with tickets and a homeless guy asks you for a couple, sure as heck I'd rather see him get tickets that were going to be thrown out. I can't help it, I'm authoritarian.

But my bigger problem with the Taste is it's sort of far too commercialized. There's only a couple small mom-and-pop type restaurants and the rest are larger, well-established chains from Chicago. Why? Because Chicago charges them a bit I think. I would rather see unheard of restaurants that need the publicity in the city than Eli's Chessecake. Not that it's bad chessecake, it's not, but I know about them, and so does anybody else in the world who walks through a supermarket.