Food Trucks & Wine

I had a super busy weekend so instead of doing a picture overload, I'm splitting the post into two parts.  Today will be two festivals that Todd & I went to over the weekend and tomorrow's post will be about Emily's bachelorette party in Akron.

On Friday night, Todd & I drove down to the Columbus Commons (two times in 1 week!) for the Food Truck & Cart Festival.  The food truck scene hit Columbus a couple years ago and it's exploded.  There are a ton of food trucks, although I'm not sure where they actually are because I've yet to see one parked anywhere, and I wanted to experience it myself firsthand.  The festival was going on all day so it was pretty crowded by the time we got there.  They had almost the entire perimeter of the green space lined with about 40 food trucks and carts.  We made the mistake of walking around the entire festival first before deciding where to eat.  Of course, by the time we decided, the lines were twice as long.  To make matters worse, you had to stand in a separate line for drink tickets and another line for the actual drink.  This was the second year for the festival and after the craziness of last year when a lot more people came then expected, they supposedly revamped the concept but it was still crazy.  I read that 20,000 people went!

Entrance to the festival

A view from the parking garage across the street

There was live music on the stage

While I stood in line at the Cheesy Truck for about 20 minutes, Todd got our drinks.  Once I ordered, I found out I had to wait another 25 minutes to actually get my food.  In the meantime, we walked to a food cart that wasn't too crowded and Todd got himself a gyro. I had a few bites and it was delicious.

Todd & his gyro

I went back over to the Cheesy Truck for my sandwich and tots while Todd got in line for the food truck with the shortest line and ended up getting chicken on a stick with fries.  The fries were soggy and the chicken wasn't anything great.....which was probably why the line was so short.

Not very tasty

However, my pulled pork with mac & cheese sandwich on Texas toast and tots were amazing!  It was well worth the 45 minute wait

By the time we left Columbus Commons around 8:30 PM, it was more crowded than when we got there at 6:30 PM.  The lines were ridiculously long and some of the trucks had already run out of food. It was a fun evening but I'm not sure I'd go again.

On Sunday afternoon, Todd & I went downtown to the North Market for the Ohio Wine Festival.  This was our 4th year going and is a nice tradition we have.  We get there, I'm usually on an empty stomach, buy tickets, and start drinking wine.  About 30 minutes later, I'm feeling tipsy, cut myself off, and we head to dinner.  The first year we went, it was our one year anniversary of dating, and we ran into a bunch of my co-workers.  We ended up staying at the wine festival a little too long and I unfortunately don't remember much of our nice, romantic dinner at Martini's.  I actually had to ask Todd the next day if anything really important was said.  Yeah, real classy. 

Anyways, we obviously love this festival and love trying some of the local wine.  We've been so many times now, we know most of the vineyards and which people working the booths will give big pours so we typically start there.  For $20, we got 2 tasting glasses and 20 tasting tickets. The tastings vary from 1 to 4 tickets.  We set a new record this year and used all of our drink tickets in 40 minutes.  It wasn't as crowded as it normally is and a storm was rolling in so we made the most of our time.

Enjoying my first taster

Todd & I loving life...and wine

After drinking wine, we stopped for dinner at Cap City Diner.  We hadn't been here in a few years and knew it would hit the spot. 

We started with soft pretzels and beer cheese...I highly recommend these

I had the Caesar Chicken Milanese salad, which was more chicken than salad, but still tasty....and I had leftovers for lunch

Todd got the grilled cheese sandwich with fried egg on it but I forgot to snap a picture.

And if that wasn't enough food, we obviously had to stop at Graeter's on the way home for National Ice Cream Day--2 scoops for $2.84!