Taste of Kalamazoo

Festival of local flavor

By Alyssa Herter
Western Herald

The Taste of Kalamazoo Festival is one of the city’s long-standing traditions, and no wonder, with a combination platter of the best food in town and nightly rock shows.

There is no reason to be bored the weekend of July 16. The Arcadia Creek Festival Place will be the lively place to be. The whole community tends to show up for this once-a-year event.

The festival highlights local cuisine and includes tastings from area restaurants, breweries, and wineries. It began in 1985 under the name Taste of Downtown, and then featured a dozen downtown eateries. These days Taste of Kalamazoo has grown to include restaurants in the greater Kalamazoo area. Last year more than 30 vendors filled the Arcadia Creek Festival Place.

“I really like the way it brings together all the local restaurants and lets you sort of sample the food at all of them; see what kind of great local food we’ve got going on,” said Geordie Davidson, a Western Michigan University public law major.

No matter what your taste, this festival has something to offer; the fest features everything from fine dining bistros to burger joints. Last year’s menu included Zazio’s, The People’s Food Co-op, Sushi Ya, Coney Island and Shawarma King. Each food vendor peddles their own signature items. Care is taken to make sure sellers don’t bring duplicate menu items which means over 200 different dishes are available to try.

The “Taste” works on a ticket system. Tickets are sold at the gates for 50 cents a piece and each food item is sold for a certain amount of tickets with the most expensive selling for a mere $3.50.

The cuisine is hardly the only exciting reason to check it out. During the afternoons, family activities such as pony rides, comedians, and cooking demonstrations keep the Festival Place buzzing.

When the sun goes down, the state-of-the-art performance stage lights up. Bands play from 5 p.m. into the night all weekend, making the Taste of Kalamazoo a hotspot for nightlife. Past line-ups have included the Hard Lessons, Greensky Bluegrass and the Verve Pipe.

“I love live music; I think it is the most important to have at any open air festival and Taste of Kalamazoo is a big enough deal that they always have really good stuff. I guess I just feel like it’s really a kind of relaxing atmosphere to go out and enjoy food, enjoy music, and enjoy company,” Davidson said.

The Taste of Kalamazoo is a fun, laid-back, low-cost opportunity to get out and experience what the city has to offer.  It caters to all age groups and serves as a common ground for the entire city to share time in community. Stop by the Arcadia Creek Festival Place this July to see why this is one of Kalamazoo’s most looked forward to festivals.

“It’s fantastic for the college crowd. We always get kind of locked into campus and forget about the city that we live in and its great to highlight it, and, it’s just a great atmosphere,” Davidson said.

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Apr 15 2009. Filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Cody Kimball
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