These Fries are With The Band

It’s the Los Angeles music scene meets Burning Man meets Glastonbury meets a cattle call. Imagine walking around a mall at Christmastime, except you’re outside in the desert and it’s 100 degrees. Practically everyone around you is dressed in bikini-size shorts and enjoying various states of intoxication. And it’s really, really dusty.

No, you’re not in hell. This is Coachella, one of the must-attend spring music festivals, where 225,000 or so people gather to wear crazy outfits and hear bands like Outkast and see celebrities like Beyoncé run onstage. It’s not the sort of venue where one expects to find high-quality food and drink.

But, as it turns out, artisanal eating and a three-day party in the desert go hand in hand. Music festivals could be ushering in a new wave of “spring love” for good food and the culture it brings.

The dinner series Outstanding in the Field – known for one long table in a bucolic setting, serving locally sourced food and drink of the highest quality – made its debut at Coachella this year. It was their inaugural run at working at a music festival, but they are already planning more, like dinners at Lollapalooza in August. “This is the first time we’ve dealt with waves of sound,” Jim Denevan, the series’ founder, says, craning his neck toward the bulbous white tent looming just outside of the Rose Garden. “Usually we just have the waves of the ocean.”

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[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cochella1.jpg” number=”1″ caption=”Palm trees frame the Southern California desert music (and now food) festival.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cochelllllllla.jpg” number=”2″ caption=”Jimmy Han, proprietor of Beer Belly.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cochella3.jpg” number=”3″ caption=”Even the main food area caters to restricted diets.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cochella4.jpg” number=”4″ caption=”Fresh watermelon from a Coachella fruit stand.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cochella5.jpg” number=”5″ caption=”Beer Belly “grilled cheese” and deep-fried Oreos with Nutella.”]
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They offered two seatings, twice a day, on both of the festival’s April weekends. Tickets ran $225 a pop; business was brisk, with some dinners selling out.

And Outstanding in the Field was only the tip of the locavore spear at Coachella. This year the festival, which Billboard Boxscore reported raked in more than $47 million in gross ticket sales in 2012, turned its behemoth attention toward the robust Los Angeles food culture. Shepherded by the pop-up community event Artisanal L.A., a collective of Angeleno institutions and chefs set up booths (or “yurts,” as organizers referred to them) and did their best to ply high-end cuisine to the dizzy, dehydrated teenaged Coachella masses.

Jimmy Han opened Beer Belly in Los Angeles’s Koreatown in May of 2011 as an outpost for locally brewed beer and innovative gastropub-style food. When he was invited to vend his fried Oreos and pork-belly chips at Coachella this year, he couldn’t say no. “Coming to Coachella and working with all this music and art around us – it’s a natural fit,” Han says. “It doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be fancy – just something that comes from someone else’s mind, and someone puts a little effort into it, some TLC. Other people can appreciate that.”

In stark contrast to the Heineken-soppy, sports-bar vibe that usually defines the rest of the festival, Beer Belly’s outpost was inside of a specialized structure meant to house the higher-end beer offerings, set apart from the rest of Coachella by wooden latticework and an average customer age probably double that of other concertgoers. And even if the rest of the yurts outside the beer garden seemed to be doing considerably slower business without the draw of primo beverages, their presence made you feel like you were at a festival that draws from its community, not just consumes it.

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[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/coch1.jpg” number=”1″ caption=”A chef’s assistant working the lamb spit at Outstanding in the Field dinner on April 18.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/coch2.jpg” number=”2″ caption=”Making cocktails at dinner.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/coch3.jpg” number=”3″ caption=”Passing the lamb family style at the dinner. This was the first time Outstanding in the Field cooked at a music festival.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/coch4.jpg” number=”4″ caption=”Chef Christian Page of Short Order (left) and his sous chef preparing lamb.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/coch5.jpg” number=”5″ caption=”Dinner bros!”]
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Coachella is hardly idiosyncratic – it’s part of a nationwide trend that is seeing music festivals grow into all-around cultural experiences. Others include Outside Lands in San Francisco, the Governors Ball in New York City, Bonnaroo in Tennessee and Sasquatch in central Washington, to’name a few.

Kerry Black, a partner at Superfly Presents – an events company that put on the now-defunct food festival The Great GoogaMooga in addition to current festivals Outside Lands and Bonnaroo – says that, since Outside Lands began in 2008 with a rare food and drink focus, the event has shifted from highlighting the artist headliners to being equal parts about the music, the food and the wine.

“You’re seeing more festivals doing this because, with the explosion of the food world, people are expecting a higher level of food quality at all events,” he says.

Black adds that, because these offerings exist as concessions, they don’t raise the ticket prices; they’re basically something festivalgoers can choose whether they want to opt in to or not.

Other promoters agree. “New Yorkers have very high standards,” Tom Russell, one of the promoters behind the Governors Ball in New York City, says. “We want people to be eating the same quality of food that they eat in their everyday life.”

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[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/co1.jpg” number=”1″ caption=”Coachella fans chow down on artisanal fare.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/co2.jpg” number=”2″ caption=”The scene outside the main food area.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/co3.jpg” number=”3″ caption=”Healthy Snacks, it’s a thing.”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/co4.jpg” number=”4″ caption=”Banh mi pizza, from the Mohawk Bend stand (right next to Beer Belly’s stand).”]
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/co5.jpg” number=”5″ caption=”Loitering around one of the art installations at Coachella.”]
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At Coachella’s Outstanding in the Field dinner, the quality of food is noticeably higher than what most people eat in everyday life. Around 5:30 p.m., the first seating of the first weekend is in the midst of the Rose Garden, Coachella’s pristine VIP setting – it’s all manicured grass, arbors and small-batch sake booths. The sun is setting over the seemingly endless, white-clothed table. Chef Casey Lane, of the Venice, California, mecca the Tasting Kitchen, drew from his own farm and catering experience: He pulls off a seamlessly executed sequence of tomato and artichoke salads and porchetta from spit-turned pigs, all served family style.

But by the time dessert comes out – a black-walnut crumble served in plastic cups the size of shot glasses – the weather has cooled from oppressive to a dusky pleasantness. With the sounds of heart-palpitating bass in the background, it’s unanimous: This is a pretty great place to eat a meal.