LA Times Celebration Of Food & Wine

The LA Times' first Celebration of Food & Wine went off without a hitch on Sunday, although the experience seems to have depended on what kind of tickets you bought. Riley Breckenridge of the OC Weekly opted to settle for the lower-tier tickets, quipping, "I consider myself neither 'important,' nor 'very important.' " Here's his take on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly at the festival. Meanwhile, food blogger Darin of Darin Dines ponied up for the VIP tickets, admitting, "If I had gotten the GA ticket, I probably would have been completely unsatisfied." (click through for his gorgeous pictures of the food).

Panel topics included "Food Blogging" (with Aarti Sequeira of The Next Food Network Star) and "Life After Top Chef" (with Betty Fraser, C.J. Jacobsen, and Alex Reznik of Bravo's Top Chef). There were cooking demonstrations by Chef Roger Mooking of The Cooking Channel's "Everyday Exotic" and by LA chefs Suzanne Goin of AOC and Lucques and Mark Peel of Campanile and the Tar Pit, to name a few. And of course, the Paramount lot where the festival was held was crawling with food trucks.