Concord Japanese American Food Festival
So today the wife introduced me to an area I had never really visited before: Concord. The reason for our foray was the annual Japanese American Food Festival. Nestled right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, the festival is primarily a culinary affair (of course), with makeshift wooden booths and a sheltered seating area surrounding a pagoda-style pavilion structure in the middle.
A plate of tempura was $7.50 and beer (Sapporo, Asashi and Kirin Ichiban) was $5, but a glass of iced (or hot - though in the 105-degree heat I didn’t see many of those being sold) sake was $2 (iced sake is surprisingly good!) and maguro was $1.50. There was terriyaki (chicken & beef), udon and gyosa as well as icees and a variety of pastries and desserts.
Strangely (or perhaps, given the suburban location, not so strangely), there were many people who arrived to the free event, purchased food and left with it in take-away containers. As for us, we sat amongst the crowd, noshed the delicious Japanese fare and people watched. Having lived in Ireland for half a dozen years, I have truly missed Japanese cuisine and feel I’ve some serious catching up to do. We became so desperate while abroad that we actually taught ourselves how to make sushi and searched far and wide until we found a reliable fish monger from which to buy truly fresh fish to make it with. I still remember that first bite of fresh atlantic salmon . . . we thought it was delicious, regardless of how bad our attempt actually was. After years of denial, we could have torn into that raw steak of fish like handless neanderthals.
That disturbing image aside, the Concord Japanese festival was enjoyable for ourselves, grandma and the little ones and we’ll definitely be making plans to come again next year. We sat under the bamboo screen while old-school Japanese ballads floated through a WWII-style PA system, occasionally interrupted by raffle ticket announcements. Udon, tempura and terriyaki were the order of the day and the munchkin enjoyed the cheap (50 cent) game booths for kids that included fishing (throw a string over a wall and reel in your prize), catching floating rubber ducks with a net and a lollypop tree (if your lollypop has a red dot on the end, you get a prize - if not, you still get to keep your lollypop). Heck, they even had a kanji henna tattoo artist booth.
Aside from the kid booths there was a banzi tree display and, later on (we didn’t stay for it) some taiko drumming and Japanese traditional dance acts. My mother-in-law has been making the trip out to this festival for years and was surprised as the low turn out (even though, to my eyes, the place was pretty well packed). She said that previous years there would be a 30-minute wait in line for beer and food items (there was virtually no wait this year) and it was actually hard to move around the festival due to the amount of people. I guess the recession affects everything - I just hope it won’t prevent the organizers from holding this wonderful event next year.
Filed under: Excursions, Things to do with the kids