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The Family Style Food Festival recently took place in West Hollywood of Los Angeles, California with its most successful iteration yet. This festival began in 2019 and has since become a premier event where fashion, food, music, and even new concepts such as NFTs and Web3 come together. The event is hosted by popular LA-based streetwear brand, The Hundreds, and is described as “an immersive festival experience perfectly pairing the streetwear and culinary worlds with real-life entertainment. Family Style features a delicious food lineup, top-tier restaurants (including out-of-state legends), collaborative merchandise from the hottest brands and designers, Family Style’s own “Next In Line” cooking competition, a Kid’s Area, and a curated music lineup.”
R: Oishii, famous for high-quality strawberries in an “Omakase Berry Set”, created an exclusive batch of Omakase Berry Oat Milk.
Considering Los Angeles’ place as one of the top culinary destinations in the world, the festival had plenty of local options to choose from and highlight. This included a vast range of restaurants from trendy newcomers such as Yangban Society, to historic classes like Mozza. Beyond this, the festival curated a collection of restaurants across many different price ranges, with multiple Michelin-starred establishments in attendance, such as Kato, down to famous street food, including longstanding taco truck, Tacos y Birria La Unica. Regardless of their price points and presence outside of the festival, they were all able to showcase their culinary skills, collaborate with top designers, and introduce new customers to their cooking.
Although Los Angeles has enough revolutionary restaurants, musicians, and fashion designers on its own, the creators of Family Style were insistent on showcasing talent from all over the world. The most notable, global food appearance came from a small, Paris-based sandwich shop named Paperboy. Paperboy was selected for its alignment with family style, given that the high-quality sandwich shop has previously collaborated on a pair of shoes with New Balance, and is well known for selling streetwear inside of its shop. On the fashion side, the Japanese powerhouse fashion brand, Fragment Design, could be found collaborating with a premiere Yakiniku spot from Beverly Hills, Yazawa.
Although there have been many food festivals in the U.S. and elsewhere, many of them provide little to no experience outside of the food, giving consumers not much reason to attend. Not only does Family Style focus heavily on the live experience through the incorporation of live music and interactive family spaces, but also by capitalizing on current trends such as NFTs. One of the most interesting collaborations present at the festival was between a popular Los Angeles restaurant, Chifa, and a popular NFT project, Azuki. The two parties collaborated to create an exclusive, high-quality meat cleaver as well as a limited edition t-shirt.
In conclusion, Family Style Food Festival is a great reference point for in-person events going forward. Although the main focus was food, the festival created an engaging experience for all visitors through its extremely diverse collections of brands, restaurants, and experiences.
