If you’ve watched even a single episode of “The Bear,” then you know there’s only one appropriate response in a restaurant kitchen: Yes, chef.
But there’s one woman in San Francisco who regularly gets away with telling chefs no — not just vetoing what they cook, but also telling them how to cook it.
To be clear, Tanya Kollar is not a chef. As food curator for Outside Lands Music Festival, which begins Friday, Kollar is the event’s culinary gatekeeper, responsible for vetting the 100 local restaurants and pop-ups that will feed 225,000 attendees during the three-day event at Golden Gate Park.
She joined the Outside Lands team in 2010 as assistant to then-curator Ari Feingold. But a lack of professional kitchen experience hasn’t stopped her from instructing chefs to swap African shrimp skewers for oxtail nachos (more familiar), ditch the idea of fragrant khao soi noodle soup (too hard to eat standing up), plate chicken wings with sauce on the side (fewer napkins required), or to simplify the names of dishes (for broader appeal).
“It’s very funny for me to tell a Michelin-starred chef, ‘I don’t like that,’ ” Kollar concedes. “But I have to be honest with them.”
Her wide smile betrays her substantial power. She hand-selects every business invited to sell food at the festival, helps shape menus and, during the event, eats (and provides feedback on) as many of the offerings as possible. Because restaurants stand to bring in as much as $75,000 during the three days, vending spots are highly coveted.
But you aren’t getting one unless Kollar thinks you should.
‘It is kind of a miracle they pull this thing off’
Chef Nick Cobarruvias of Mexican restaurant Otra (formerly of Son’s Addition, now closed) has been cooking at Outside Lands since 2011. He says his staff looks forward to the festival, even though it requires buying and prepping hundreds of pounds of food and putting in long hours at the park.
“I mean, it is kind of a miracle that they pull this thing off,” Cobarruvias says. “But there’s a little community, so if things go bad, you always have people willing to help.”
This year, the festival’s food program, dubbed Taste of the Bay Area, will host 100 restaurants and pop-ups, the most in the event’s history. The lineup has expanded to some of the hottest names in Bay Area food, including James Beard Award-nominated Dalida and Michelin-starred Sorrel. To generate buzz around exclusivity, Kollar is working on bringing luxurious dishes to the event like a sweet-corn Basque cheesecake topped with caviar from Sorrel, of which only about two dozen will be available each day.
“Tanya and her team turned it into more than just a music festival,” says chef Chris Yang, who is bringing his Taiwanese restaurant Piglet & Co to the festival for the third year. “I mean, there’s no festival that I know of that has this amount and caliber of food.”
Kollar recruited Yang and his wife and business partner, Marcelle Gonzales Yang, to Outside Lands in 2022. They’d cooked at Coachella the year prior, but Yang felt that the hometown event came with bigger rewards. The couple shut down their Mission District restaurant for the weekend of Outside Lands because it’s more profitable to be at the festival, where vendors’ sales can range from $15,000 to $25,000 per day.
This isn’t to say that restaurants don’t have to pay to play. Operators estimate they spend between $7,000 and $15,000 on rental equipment, staffing and ingredients before the gates open. Additionally, event producer Another Planet charges vendors a commission, usually 25%-35% of gross sales.
Kollar says above-average food and drink options were always part of Outside Lands’ DNA, but they have become more of a focus as the event has grown. The organizers established an ongoing partnership with food incubator La Cocina in 2008, the event’s first year, and began inviting fast-casual restaurants to participate after that. Pop-ups were added to the lineup around 2014.
“Then, as the years went by, I think we started to see the potential more and more,” Kollar says. “And as the possibilities grew, it was kind of like, sky’s the limit.”
Kollar keeps a running list of restaurants she hopes to recruit — she dreams of getting two-Michelin-starred Lazy Bear and the legendary State Bird Provisions to the event. Right now, she’s on the hunt for Ethiopian and Puerto Rican restaurants and someone to serve a classic poutine.
This year, 16 restaurants declined to return, and Kollar’s team got about 200 applications to take their spots. Just two or three applications were accepted, as she recruits most vendors herself.
“The responses I get back from the restaurants I decline are like, ‘But please, we can do a different menu,’ ” she says. “Or they’ll say, ‘I’ve been applying for six years!’ It’s heartbreaking for me, but I have to do what’s right for the event.”
‘Very expensive, super risky’
When she’s gatekeeping, Kollar reviews kitchen layouts to make sure restaurants don’t overload the power supply — it still happens from time to time — and checks food-prep plans to ensure that gallons of sauce don’t need to be tossed out for being stored at the incorrect temperature, which she has, horrifyingly, seen.
Not that she can prevent every issue. One year, Michelin Guide-listed Mensho flew in staff from Japan to sling noodles. When she went to troubleshoot the long line of frustrated festivalgoers, Kollar found the team making ramen to order — just like at a brick-and-mortar restaurant. “They were like, ‘We’re doing it the true, real, traditional way of making our ramen, and that takes time,’ ” Kollar says.
Chef Azalina Eusope is embarking on her 13th Outside Lands. She has cooked for Paul McCartney and Macklemore. This year, she’s crossing her fingers she’ll get to meet Post Malone.
Eusope says she doesn’t see massive profits from the festival, but it’s enough to make it worth her while. Because it’s not all about the money. When her two kids were younger, she’d bring them with her; it was an opportunity to give them the kind of concert experience she couldn’t otherwise afford.
This time around, she’s switching up her menu for the first time in years, making a noodle dish her father used to sell back in Malaysia and spring rolls made from her grandmother’s recipe. It’ll be her first year serving on the Polo Field, near the main stage. She’s now a seasoned Outside Lands pro but will never forget her first year at the event, when she baked hundreds of Malaysian bomb buns, filled with chicken curry and topped with sambal pickled carrots. Unfortunately, “no one knew what the fuck they were.”
“It’s very expensive, and it’s super risky,” Eusope says of cooking at the festival. “But if you’re looking for an experience that’s unforgettable? Do it. Give that to yourself.”