Festival food has long been a hotbed of pizza, burritos, and the occasional fancy smashburger — but San Francisco’s preeminent outdoor music festival has leveled up.
This year, Outside Lands is all about caviar.
Half a dozen local restaurants are serving bowls, tostadas, wings, and fries topped with dollops of roe. These items are no secret; each is printed clearly on the menu. But in most cases, only 10 servings are made per day. Elsewhere, there are strong showings from the pop-ups that Outside Lands added to Taste of the Bay Area this year, as well as festival mainstays like Bini’s Kitchen.
Granted, it’s increasingly difficult to find much below $25, and the line for the ever-popular Smish Smash was 20 people deep by 1:30 p.m. on Friday, but the festival lineup represents more cuisines than ever before.
Here are the most luxe offerings.
Chirashi bowl from Nobu ($30, plus $32 caviar supplement)
Polo Field, north side
Let’s start with one of the most expensive dishes this reporter has eaten at any festival: Nobu’s salmon, yellowtail, and ikura chirashi bowl. The Palo Alto location of chef Nobu Matsuhisa’s global empire is selling this gaudy, radiant display of top-tier poke for $30, with an option to crown it with Osetra for $32 more. Yes, with a 20% tip, this poke bowl is approaching the $75 mark, but considering that $30 has all but become the floor for a meal at Outside Lands, it’s reasonable to conclude that this is a splurge but not an utterly outrageous one.
My Friend Fernando’s wagyu beef tostada ($30)
Hellman Hollow, south side
Near the Panhandle Stage, Oakland pop-up My Friend Fernando is hawking a wagyu-beef-slathered chile colorado atop a totomoxtle (corn husk) tortilla for $30. Don’t get distracted by the little white flowers; this is the most generous caviar presentation we’ve come across. The dish had no fewer than seven spoonfuls of roe, each as big as a ripe blackberry, but could have benefited from a bit of citrus or something else acidic.
General Roe’s caviar fries from Mamahuhu ($35)
Polo Field, south side
The cleverest caviar dish this year is Mamahuhu’s General Roe’s caviar fries ($35), garlic-dusted, ear-shaped, “cleaver-cut” potato slices that wear their MSG proudly. By topping the ginger-scallion crème fraîche with Tsar Nicoulai caviar, the casual cousin to Mister Jiu’s has found a way to transform the potato-chip-sour-cream-and-caviar canapé into a hot meal. It’s delicious and — more important — filling, the very definition of affordable luxury that this ever-bougier festival affords.
Provecho’s sashimi tostada ($30)
Hellman Hollow, south side
A few booths down from Fernando is another $30 tostada, from Provecho, a pop-up by chef Eder Ramirez that appears everywhere from Mission wine bar El Chato to Tenderloin specialty shop Tahona Mercado. Ramirez’s sashimi tostada is an impressive and visually stunning tortilla covered in bluefish, labneh, cucumber, and both ikura and Osetra — not so much fusion as a veritable collision of continents.