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Street Food to Star at Oakland's Eat Real Festival in August

By Meredith Brody in Brody, Pavement Cuisine

Friday, Jun. 12 2009 @ 12:34PM

Nothing is hotter these days than street food, but some of the newest sidewalk chefs are rolling out their carts without the blessings of local authorities. Even if you track them down via Twitter, you may show up to find they've been busted before you get there. If you're hungry for the latest, hottest, tastiest, most imaginative, and cheapest street food around -- that's guaranteed to be there when you are! -- the Eat Real Festival just might be your meat. From Friday, August 28, through Sunday, August 30, Jack London Square will be ground zero for a celebration of what director Anya Fernald calls "putting the food back in fast."

Fernald, executive director of last year's Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco, promises an amazing array of meals-on-wheels. There'll be more than a dozen taco trucks, each selling one or two items featuring at least some sustainable ingredients. "We did our research -- dozens of tastings," Fernald said. "Eight or nine of the taco trucks will be from the streets, and the rest will house special vendors offering everything that we want fast food to be: healthy, local, inexpensive. Everything will be priced between $1 and $5. This is about an alternative fast food: pho, chaat, dosas. There'll be food carts, too -- all vendors have to be on wheels! We want to support and celebrate local vendors and artisans, taking the lessons we learned from Slow Food Nation and building on its momentum."

The three-day fest is shaping up as the culmination of a week-long celebration of street food, beginning in the Mission with La Cocina's day-long Street Food Festival on August 22. It continues with a week of special street-food-inspired fundraising restaurant dinners.

Eat Real isn't ready to release the names of vendors -- it'll make announcements via Twitter -- but we hear that stars of Slow Food Nation's marketplace, including El Huarache Loco, Boccalone, and Fatted Calf, just might be on site. And expeditions to Fremont have reportedly turned up exciting chaat possibilities.

Dave McClean of Magnolia Pub & Brewery is curating the 30 Northern California breweries who will fill the Beer Shed, the only part of the even that requires a ticket ($20 will buy five generous tastings and a souvenir glass). Admission to everything else is free. There'll be musicians, dancers, spoken-word performances, cooking demonstrations, outdoor screenings of food films, and, of course, a pop-up farmers' market. The market promises to feature artisanal pickles and jams as well as fresh produce shimmering in the August sun.

As Fernald said: "Great beer, great tacos, on the waterfront in Oakland. How perfect is that?"