The not so cool Food Festival – Karachi Eat Festival 2015

So the city of lights was buzzing with hype regarding the food festival. The festival was organized at Frere Hall. I attended on Sunday 25^th January around 7:30pm so maybe my review would be biased.

First thing the food available there is easily accessible to everyone on this side of the bridge. I did not see anything from Burns road, Ghaffar ki Nihari or Zameer Ansari's chatakh boti. I did not see innovative food, something different from the usual cuisine that we have here in Karachi. I was expecting more of things like Dhood Jalabi, Lassi from the streets of Lahore and street food from around the globe.

The other thing that I hated was that when you are organizing an event which is being marketed heavily across the city it should be able to manage the turnover of people as well. The festival was extremely crowded and mismanaged. Although every food kiosk was giving away food in wraps and paper plates there were no rubbish bins to dispose wrappers. The ground was extremely uneven making me confused between the choice of either tripping on uneven surface or running into someone standing nearby (Seriously the place was super crowded I wasn't even able to breath). 

Forget all that, did Karachi seriously ran out of open ground spaces that the organizers had to select an important heritage sight such as Frere Hall to ruin it?

There was no system to handle the traffic. Now you are organizing an event on weekend in a city like Karachi where you already have crazy traffic problems. And then you chose a venue which honestly has zero parking capacity. Chaos is what all you will get in the end.

I was not able to enjoy food or anything else. Brand activations were super weak and did not grab my attention at all. Although a huge number of people might have attended the festival but it was a complete failure for me in terms of management and creativity.  

#EatKarachi #FoodFestival #Karachi