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The press conference yesterday announcing the September Chicago Gourmet festival at Millennium Park went off without a hitch. Mayor Daley brought to the conference the "Chi-CAW-go is a world class city" enthusiasm that earned us (read: him) the right to fight for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Reading the press release last night, however, caused us to break out in cold sweats. If you want to attend the festival, it'll cost you a cool $150 per day, or $250 for a weekend pass. That would be translated into a couple rolls of Taste of Chicago food and drink tickets. Maybe they'll have unannounced weekend pass sales for cheap, like Lollapaooza.
That sticker shock really puts a damper on the festival, in our opinion (although we'll still go). A festival that is supposed to highlight the best we have to offer in fine food and wine should be accessible to all of the city's residents. Maybe we should take a page from the Mayor's Children's Museum playbook and ask if he doesn't want poor and working class families heading to Millennium Park to see how foie gras really tastes.
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My question is for the $150 ticket, how much food do you actually get to taste/sample? It also sounds like some of the more interesting parts of the event will happen in seminars, which they plan to charge an additional fee to attend. The press release seems to suggest plenty of wine tastings will be conducted, but it is pretty vague on how the food portion of the event will work. I think I would rather just put the $150 towards a night out at Alinea or Trotter's.
Of course there's a high ticket price- if the economics of an event like TofC could support gourmet options, those options would be available at the regular TofC.
This one isn't for consumption by "the public".
That's a lotta clams!