It Is Too Effing Hard To Get Funnel Cake At Chicago Music Festivals
By Mae Rice in Food on Jul 29, 2016 6:22PM
Out of three of Chicago's biggest music festivals—Pitchfork, Lollapalooza and Riot Fest—you can only buy a funnel cake at Riot Fest. Why is Chicago one for three on this most important of issues? Why are we, as a city, turning away from the greatest, most fried of foods?
Riot Fest isn't even officially committed to funnel cakes in 2016. (Though to be fair, they have bigger fish to fry, like corralling Morrissey.) A spokesperson said only that vendors served funnel cakes last year and it's "perfectly reasonable to expect them this year," but ultimately the offerings are up to the vendors themselves.
Lollapalooza, meanwhile, takes a vehemently anti-funnel cake stance. A spokesperson for Chow Town told Chicagoist that the food court's motto is "far from funnel cakes and turkey legs." This has resulted in an amazing food lineup, by all standards... except the funnel cake standard. Why not have sushi and ramen and whatever Momofuku Milk Bar is so famous for (milk?) and also, somewhere—perhaps in the type of curtained off section video stores used for porn?—a GODDAMN FUNNEL CAKE.
Pitchfork has not given us their official take on funnel cakes, but I happen to know, because I have been on the prowl for funnel cakes and found only vegan ice cream at several Pitchforks, that they're not serving funnel cakes—though they could, unlike Lolla, support them in theory.
Listen, festival food people: You are very knowledgeable about food, and I respect that, but you are whiffing when it comes to funnel cakes. Funnel cakes are great. They're piles of fried nothing! With sugar on top! And they're only really socially appropriate to eat at music festivals, where you're hot and hungry and there are no rules. Please serve more funnel cakes, so that Chicagoans can live their best lives and watch ceaseless surprise appearances from Chance the Rapper while full of oily dough. Thanks in advance.