7X7 Big Eat Live

This was a very poorly planned event. We arrived around 1:45pm (event was advertised as running until 4pm), and already there were a number of booths that were shutting down because they were out of food. As more booths closed, the lines at the remaining booths got exponentially longer. By 2:30pm, only a few booths remained open, with very long lines. In all, we were able to sample just SIX of the 30 items available. A complete rip-​off. We left and went straight to a restaurant on the Embarcadero for lunch because we were still very hungry. $ 150 (plus transportation) down the drain.
My wife contacted 7×7 to request a refund, and we were denied, but offered tickets for next years event. My wife refused that offer out of principal (and why would we want to go through this again?). The staff at 7×7 tried to blame the individual restaurants for not being adequately prepared. However, several restaurants we contacted indicated that they were told to expect about a 1000 participants, when apparently there were about 2000 tickets sold. 7×7 staff also complained about numerous other factors that were «out of their control,» but clearly could have and should have been within their control. Just a pathetic showing, and I literally feel like we were defrauded.
Nice idea, utter failure; utter lack of accountability.

I have to wonder if the previous reviewer stayed for more than an hour. The first restaurants began running out of food by 1:30, which led to longer lines at the remaining booths. By about 2:30 there were no more than five or six still open, including wineries. Even getting there on time and moving quickly from one booth to another, we were only able to sample about 14 of the 30 restaurants featured. Not exactly what I would call «all you can eat». A tasting event means tiny portions, which is fine, but we expected more than 14 of them!
By 3pm the place was pretty deserted, as everyone had gone off in search of food. We left hungry, disappointed, and vowing that we will definitely not make this mistake again.

I am very surprised that there is no Unilocal review for this festival…
Well, I personally never heard of this festival until… I, on a whim, entered a contest on KTVU and WON a pair of tickets to this festival!!! woohoooooo!!!
The face value of the ticket was $ 75/​tix … yup, it was certainly not cheap but basically you get ALL YOU CAN EAT and free wine tasting at the event. There were about 30 food vendors from local restaurants in SF, each serving a dish from their restaurant.
They’re not «street food vendors» so some were definitely struggling in keeping up with serving their food timely… We got to the festival about 10 minutes before the starting time… the line was long at the security check point to enter the (AT&T) Park, so by the time we got to the field where the festival was at… it was probably around 12:10 and some of the booths weren’t ready with their food. Some of the food also were not prepared well. The bacon wrapped dates… such a simple dish (I made this at home before!!) were undercooked… the bacon could certainly stayed longer in the fryer… And there was this pork dish that was PINK with some blood… pork is not safe to eat raw yo! I only devoured the pieces that looked well done. luckily didn’t get sick (yet).
The lines started forming quickly but most also moved fairly quick too.
There were cash bars for drinks (we were cheap, so we just drank fee wine from the wine tasting places and brought bottle water. heheheheheheh) and the lines for the cash bars were ehemmm… impressively long!
Some of the food booth had shorter lines than others… mostly because either their food were easier to serve that people didn’t have to wait around for food or they weren’t «popular» items… like the «caviar» booth… nearly had nobody running for them… Same with the chicken liver mousse booth ahahah… their loss, my gain!
Yeah, the tix were pricey but if you want to stick around and continuously eat for 4 hours (festival runs from 12 to 4pm)… I think it would be worth it to check out … kind of!!! As for me… it’s off the «foodie-​check-​list for now :)