The "Gourmet Taste of Chicago" Will Cost You

By Chuck Sudo in Food on May 21, 2008 4:39PM

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.