Thousands poured into Prospect Park this weekend for the first annual Great Googa Mooga festival, a foodie theme park of New York's most coveted culinary creators.
The festival, thrown by the organizers of Bonnaroo, included food from the biggest, most delicious names in NYC restaurants: Blue Ribbon, Craft, The Spotted Pig, Tia Pol, Luke's Lobster, Porchetta, Frankies 457 Spuntino, Crif Dogs and so, so many more.
For those with VIP access, there were a slew of talks and showcases by food world rock stars like David Chang, Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain (who described his feelings about eating humans). Marcus Samuelsson hosted a Harlem Renaissance party. Aziz Ansari and James Murphy had lunch together on stage and took questions from the crowd (FYI: Murphy said his favorite album for a BBQ would be the Strokes' Is This It). Some of the city's best oyster shuckers engaged in a ruthless shucking competition, Big Gay Ice Cream hosted a disco party, and Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors roasted an 867-pound prime black angus steer whole (pictured below).
In the excitement of the event, which had the wild remote desert feeling of a Brooklyn Coachella, people found themselves waiting on line for 30 minutes or more for a pork taco, or an hour to hoard as many beers as they could hold. As the day wore on, some were not as fed as they would have like to have been, and there were reports of a fist fight at the Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken event, in which some "drunk girl went all Jersey Shore" on the man behind her.
Oh, and there was music (ie the Roots) but the daytime bands were merely a soundtrack to the eat-a-thon.
In other words, this impressive curation could have been too much for a mere mortal to consume in one blow -- especially if, like us, you spent a lot of time returning to the PDT booth (also pictured below). We suspect many will have to come back year and year to get it right.
Like all big Brooklyn events the crowd was a spectacle all its own, so we asked some of the more interesting looking foodies to tell us what they'd eaten (and then stumbled home and had dreams about Mile End's pastrami).
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