Huge crowds draw vendors to 12th annual Taste of Soul festival
A bleary-eyed Monique Webb pulled off the Interstate 10 late night Friday, Oct. 20, after the long drive south from Sacramento. The owner of the Northern California food truck, Mo’Betta Finger Foods Food on Wheels, got to the 12th annual Taste of Soul festival site around 11 p.m. She arrived with three cars packed to the gills with ingredients for the long Saturday ahead; working through the night, she set up her booth and cooked with the colleagues and friends who accompanied her.
“We’ve been up cutting up food all night,” she said. “We’ve been up marinating. We just fried up the alligator right there on the stick. It takes a lot of patience because you’re looking for a certain type of taste. A lot of people will be like, ‘alligator tastes like chicken,’ but it doesn’t. It has its own unique taste; frog legs have their own unique taste.”
By 10 a.m. the next day, with set-up over, the exhaustion of the night before was replaced with a palpable excitement from the festival vendors.
Webb’s stand was one of hundreds lining Crenshaw Boulevard on Saturday, Oct. 21. Vendors and organizations under pop-up canopy tents sold food, merch, or offered community services to the roughly 300,000 Taste of Soul attendees strolling past delicious aromas and dancing by music stages. Before she arrived, Webb was unsure of what to expect from LA’s largest one-day street festival. This was her first time participating; she said it felt like a blind date.
“If I break even, I’m going to be happy because it’s a great experience,” she said. “I just want people to taste my food, to get it out there and say that they’ve tasted alligator and frog legs.”
Webb wasn’t the only vendor to come from outside of Los Angeles to participate in Taste of Soul. Kim and Anthony Black, who sell vintage black sports league memorabilia and apparel, have travelled from North Carolina to South LA year after year.
“We love it, we wouldn’t come back otherwise,” Kim Black said. “The energy is great, you get to see a lot of things that we don’t get to see, all coming together. There’s different vendors, there’s food, there’s art. There’s just so much.”
For those selling merchandise at Taste of Soul, preparation involves deciding what and how much to bring.
“We know there’s 350,000 people so we kind of go by the history of the year before,” Kim Black said. “Like last year, I think it was a Tuskegee Airmen that people were really into, so we have a little bit more of that. Of course, now that we have the Tuskegee Airmen, then people want buffalo soldiers, so we never really know. We just try to have a good representation of everything and we just kind of gage.”
“I just love this event,” said Brian McMillan, owner of the South Los Angeles bakery Kobbler King. “It’s fun to come out here and see a lot of people you haven’t seen in years, and I look forward to that.”
For this year’s Taste of Soul, McMillan had a truck and several booths scattered down the stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard that was closed to traffic during the festival. Each stand was stacked with cobblers and various homemade desserts, as well as coolers of complementary ice cream hidden between the empty cardboard boxes in the back.
“They go to your first location and like your product so much they want something else or they catch you on the way out,” McMillan said. “It really, really benefits your business.”
McMillan has gained a lot of knowledge and experience over the years. It has helped streamline event prep and setup. A 12-year veteran of Taste of Soul, he has the process down to a science, but it wasn’t always that way.
“My first event, I worked like two days straight,” McMillan said. “I probably made like $600. I learned from that point that you don’t make [the food] there. No one cares if it’s hot or not. You know people are here to get some food; they’re going to eat and they’re going to leave and go to the next place to look around.”
Kobbler King goes to more than 25 events every year. McMillan brought more than 3,000 desserts to Taste of Soul. He said the South LA street festival is the only place where he can sell that kind of volume and make a good profit in only one day.
“I love the vibe here,” said Joycelin Hill of All Seasons BBQ and Catering, a restaurant from Diamond Bar. This year was Hill’s first time helping her uncle Mark Hill at Taste of Soul. “You know everybody’s coming together as a community eating different kinds of meat, different activities,” she said.
While licking the last remnants of peach cobbler or nibbling alligator-on-a-stick, Taste of Soul attendees (some wearing new merch) watched live music on the five stages scattered between the booths on Crenshaw Boulevard. Performers included R&B artists Brandy and Melanie Fiona, and rapper Kool Moe Dee.
The StarQuest Sound Stage featured adult and child music competitions with contestants from the community. Ryan Wirtz won the StarQuest Adult category with his performance of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On.” He and the kid’s winner, Nancy Fifita, each took home $500 and got to wow the crowd again on the 94.7 The Wave Stage later that day.
Monique Webb of Mo’Betta Finger Foods Food on Wheels turned off the ovens at 6:30 p.m. She stopped the sale of frog legs and alligator meat at 7 p.m. By the time she and her team were packed up and ready to go, they’d been toiling for almost 24 hours.
Webb had first-date jitters at the beginning of Taste of Soul 2017,having finally reached the other side she said it was a great learning experience. She made a small profit (pretty good for a first-timer) and won’t bring as much product next time. She’s already planning to come back in a year. But first, the six-hour drive home to Sacramento for some much deserved rest.
Diana Chavando contributed reporting.
