Surrey Fusion Festival: Day Two
byLast night the Fusion Festival kicked off in Surrey’s Holland Park with dusk performances and all anticipating this morning’s events, concerts, food, crafts and activities. Day two of the Fusion Festival will be going strong until 10:00pm tonight.
Tomorrow things will pick up again at 11:00am until the grand finale performance by Jully Black on the World Stage ending at 8:00pm. This event is entirely FREE for all (and it’s also super easy to get here from the SkyTrain) so come on down and join us.
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Ah, how I wish I was there 🙁 But not feeling all too well, and I need to take some time off. But maybe tomorrow. It looks fantastic, though! Thanks for keeping us posted!
had some butter chicken for lunch – and some ice cream beads?! so good – might have to come back tomorrow and try something from peru or persia…
i was in heaven with all the countries and food to choose from – we had to walk around twice just to agree on butter chicken today lol
Thanks for the information, was interested in checking out this event for the food. The prices in the pictures seem to be a bit steep.
I’m happy I chose to attend the Taste of the City instead today, the food at that event rocked and was very reasonably priced. Will check this event out Sunday.
The food was AWESOME – we had some Jamaican patties then walked over to the El Salvador tent for some tacos with chorizo – SOoooo good!
Day two of pure gluttony as we’re spoiled with a weekend of food festivals in Vancouver.
Yesterday I was at the wonderful Taste of the City over at the PNE, this is highly recommended, as the restaurants are all well-recognized there, serve delicious food and the prices are extremely reasonable, you could get a happy full stomach for $10 easily.
Today for lunch I ventured over to the Surrey Fusion Festival, thanks in a large part to the pictures of the food tents posted here, it looked great.
First, it is expensive unless you are quite vigilant on your budget and watch portion sizes of food received, drinks cost $2 which I disliked seeing as I know right off the bat I’m being ripped off, bottled water/canned coke should not cost more then a $1.
Apart from that there were some very unique vendors, and some great deals to be had if you took the time to seek it out.
My favorite vendor was the Aboriginal catering/cooking school one. The portion was tiny but it was so delicious I forgave them. $5 for a small container of BBQ’d salmon with a lovely dill sauce served with a wild rice blend. They threw in a corn fritter, like bannock with corn for an extra $1. All of the flavours were fresh and the quality of the dish shown through. I’d have liked larger portions for $5 it was only pink salmon not sockeye but it was delicious.
The most overlooked vendor seemed to be the Chinese vendor beside the pork dumpling/steamed dumpling vendor. They offered a delicious $2 beef pancake filled with slices of seasoned beef. I thought this was a good deal, it was mini but tasty.
I also checked out the Emmanuel Restaurant papusa vendors, it did irk me that they charged a lot for their papusa, restaurant prices for an open-air venue… but I did try their chicken tamale $3 and it was filling and came with sauces/cabbage salad on top.
Yes I am a glutton because on the way out, I picked up a small container of Korean chapchae noodles, they looked so yummy and were packed with mushrooms, veggies, beef etc. I sneaked a bite and it was as delicious as it looked.
I skipped the Indian vendors, the Chola Bhatura for $6 can be easily had in a restaurant for $4 or less, it’s a snack food… other overpriced vendors included the Peruvian one charging $6 for rice with ONE bone in chicken thigh. The Jamaican patties for $3 seemed small for their size… as well as the small $4 empanadas… and $4 spanokopitas seemed a rip-off as well.
Other vendors that looked delicious but I didn’t try as I was full included the polish vendor who were doing a brisk business, their food smelled wonderful especially the fried potato latkes. The Persian vendor’s $5 ground beef kabob freshly grilled on steel skewers and served atop a square thin flatbread with parsely salad, looked unique and like it would be good. The Aremenian vendors unique $4 eggplant with tomato and egg dish was still being prepared or I would have bought some.
I didn’t like that some vendors sold prepared factory made commercial baklava, I mean hey they didn’t even bother hiding the box.
Overall the food fest was pretty good, I’m not sure how they went about choosing the vendors, or prices were set but for next year I’d recommend having more tapas size portions, ensuring the food was home-made, lower prices and putting a cap on drink prices becuase really $2 for a drink is overpriced.
For Taste of the City vendors seemed to be doing it more as a promotion for their restaurant and were generous with portions, it seemed to be more of a break-even instead of a profit venture, for the Surrey Fusion Fest you could tell that it was more of a for-profit event for most of the vendors. The drinks especially at Taste of the City were a great deal, home-made fresh mango-lemonade, or purple-corn drink etc. all for $1.50 in a nicely sized plastic cup.
Otherwise I really love these types of food festivals, I used to live in Toronto where these events happen every weekend during the summer, and it’s really nice to see it happening over here in Vancouver as well. There’s nothing better then to be snacking on something while being entertained surrounded by happy people while enjoying the sunshine.
I think the other important thing to note is that all of these food vendors are actual places you can eat at across the lower mainland. The folks selling food at El Salvador have a place in New Westminster that I am really curious about trying out sometime.
[…] the entire set on Flickr, and Rebecca has some great posts highlighting the festivities from day two and three. Our social media ninja in arms DaveO even made a guest post to give his perspective, and […]
[…] I had a chance to go to the Surrey Fusion Festival (Rebecca has awesome write-ups on the Festival here and here) with JT. This is not precisely his scene, but he knew it was important for me to go so we […]