This weekend I had the honor of joining several hundred of my peers in food blogging at the first annual Foodbuzz Blogger Festival in lovely San Francisco, California. It was an amazing experience all the way around, far more than I can fit into a single post, so I’m breaking the event down by days.

The first thing I have to say is that day one of the event was a pretty large let down for me.  This is not due to anything that the team at foodbuzz did, nor did it have anything to do with the other attendees, the vendors or the venues.  On he contrary, from what I could see the guys at Foodbuzz rawked day one.  The general feeling of dysphoria was due to a day filled with errors and delays that I carried with me to the party.  Of course that didn’t stop me from trying!

After leaving home later than I had wanted to and a long three hour drive, insane traffic on my way into the city made me late for the meet and greet.  I actually showed up just as it was getting out, so I grabbed my badge and swag bag and headed for the Ferry Building and the Street Food “Fare.”  The walk itself was beautiful.  I spotted a few people I wanted to catch up with later on the way, but they were engrossed in conversation, so I headed to the event with hopes of a cold one and something to eat.

What greeted me was something akin to carnage on a monumental scale:

I’d missed the first event by just moments, but the Street Fare event was already full to the rafters with hungry, picture snapping bloggers.  It looked slightly dangerous to try to slip into the throng while retaining all of my digits, so I sidled over to the beer booth at the entrance and downed a sample or two before braving the sea of enthusiastic souls in the pavilion.

I had a brief but pleasant conversation with Christy from balance, and while I never had the opportunity to speak with her again during the event, I must say that the conversation was nice and that she was a very pleasant person with a pretty decent blog, so go take a look when you get the time.

After a few minutes of people watching, I grabbed a second (or third) sample of the beer vendors wares and waded into the crowd in hopes of finding a familiar face.  Doing so was not an easy task, since I tend to live in places with a nearly nonexistent food blogging population (my current city has only one other blogger) and I have never met another food blogger in my career.  Luckily, one of the first places I searched yielded one of my favorite online compadrés, Mrs. Kelly Wright of Sass and Veracity, (a.k.a @kellypea ):

Kelly and I have been bantering back and forth in both blog comments and on twitter or the better part of both of our careers as food bloggers and finally having the opportunity to meet her in person was both a pleasure and an honor.  We spent the better part of the next hour chatting with each other and some of our fellow food bloggers before drifting our own ways and by that point I realized that I hadn’t sampled any of the food yet!

At this point I must apologize to almost every vendor at the event.  It’s not that I don’t love you all, or that you didn’t have wonderful foods.  It’s not that I was ignoring you on purpose. It’s not that I didn’t fully intend to break with my normal carnivorous ways and give the Alive! Catering booth a try…

None of these things could be farther from the truth.  I had fully intended to sample as much as my usually rabid appetite could handle.  The problem came in the form of pork; both in the form of 4505’s mouth watering chicharrones and because of Roli Roti’s Porhcetta.  After I met them I had no room in my heart (or stomach) for anyone else at the party.  They had me at their porcine hello’s and I was their fool for the rest of the evening.

After just a little while longer the day caught up with me and I collected my swag, myself and the funk that was still hanging with me and wandered out into the San Franciscan night and back to my hotel. (a 1/2 hour BART ride followed by a 15 minute shuttle ride.)  By the time I made it back I was only good for a few discordant tweets, a short chat with my wife and bed with a vow that tomorrow would be better.

It was, but you’ll have to wait for part two of this series to find out about it.

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