A round-up of OutsideLands 2026 most incredible food from Taste of the Bay Area

WRITER/PHOTOGRAPHER Adrian Spinelli

The food and beverage program at Outside Lands is second to none. The music festival in San Francisco’s footprint is in sweeping Golden Gate Park—the best venue for a music festival in the country—and has come to draw attendees who are just as devoted to the food and drink as they are to the music.

You see, the Taste of the Bay Area lineup featured 100 food vendors in 2026, and with each passing year it becomes a more and more accurate reflection of the best restaurants in the Bay Area’s illustrious dining scene. There are also nearly two dozen breweries and over 30 wineries in Beer Lands and Wine Lands, which both warrant multiple stopovers across the festival’s three days.

But making incredibly memorable festival food is nothing short of an artistic undertaking. It has to taste great, be hot and—since everyone fancies themself a food influencer these days—it has to look appealing (see: shareable) too. But restaurants don’t just pull up and know exactly how to execute their menus at a food festival. This is where people like Outside Lands Food Program Director Tanya Kollar and her team come into play.

““A big part of my job is essentially teaching the new restaurant partners how to translate their operation from a brick-and-mortar location to a festival vending booth,” Kollar says. “There were 18 new vendors this year and it’s a big lift for them ahead of the weekend, at a time where they could potentially feel overwhelmed. So I work with them to be as prepared as possible.”

Kollar and her team collaborate on everything from oven and refrigeration placement to sanitation infrastructure and delivering fresh water containers to every vendor. They review propane orders and fine-tune booth layouts to make sure they’ll be ready for a weekend when 225,000 people descend onto the site.

“The biggest challenge is setting up a line that’s efficient, so that you’re able to deliver hot food at any moment,” says Chef Paul Iglesias, who along with his wife Sophia Akbar, owns and operates modern Afghani restaurant Jaji, in Oakland. “We want the food to come out hot so people can taste the authenticity.”

Jaji was one of our favorite food vendors this weekend and they were running a tight ship in a collaboration booth with Oakland’s Tallboy. Along with Jaji, here is the standout food that checked all the boxes at Outside Lands, looked amazing, and was incredibly delicious. Plus some bonus shoutouts to the drinks that marked our weekend.

ELITE ASIAN COMFORT FOOD

Piglet & Co – Uni & Lu Rou Fan (left)

Chef Chris Yang is an Outside Lands madman. Last year, the Mission District’s Piglet & Co owned the caviar game. This year Yang was only one of a handful of vendors who jumped into the uni game with an Uni & Lu Rou Fan (a Taiwanese braised pork rice bowl). There were only 10 of these a day and I snagged the first one on Friday. The 5-spiced braised pork is right in Yang’s wheelhouse, a great example of what he does so well at Piglet & Co. There was smoked trout roe mixed in and gobs of uni atop furikake rice that made this the ultimate umami bomb to start the festivities.

Kajiken – Soboro (center)

Hailing from San Mateo (among other locations), Kajiken specializes in abura soba (soupless ramen) and the Soboro was a revelation of a noodle bowl. The top layer looks like it might just be marinated ground chicken, green onions, and a sublime seasoned egg, but when you dig through the barrier with your chopsticks, there’s incredibly luscious noodles in a velvety sauce of soy, vinegar, garlic, and chili oil. The tiered construction of this noodle bowl was fantastic and this was the best noodle dish of the weekend.

Kaiyō Handroll Bar – Handroll Trio (right)

Kaiyō has a great rooftop for Nikkei (Peruvian-Japanese) cuisine and drinks in SOMA. Full stop. Now, as the brand expands, Kaiyō is set to open a dedicated handroll bar on Union Street in Cow Hollow. The VIP area at Outside Lands was a stellar place to debut these offerings and this very handsome handroll trio of hamachi + avo, pisco salmon, and tuna tataki looked dashing served in the trio box.

NOT YOUR AVERAGE FESTIVAL CLASSICS

Sandy’s – Hush Puppy Corn Dog (left)

No sooner had Sandy’s made its Outside Lands debut in recent years than did the Haight Street NOLA muffuletta house become an OSL staple. The muffs are killer, and the hush puppy corn dog that flips the notion of the tired festival corn dog on its head. Hush puppy batter made with corn kernels, jalapeño, and scallion wraps around an all-beef dog and then gets beautifully lacquered with a housemade red remoulade with smoked paprika and horseradish. There was even a veggie version that debuted this year: Chef Peterson Harter and Culinary Director Casey Nunes are people for the people and I’m here for it.

Arquet – Lobster Roll (center)

How to make a lobster roll even better? Let a Michelin-starred chef have a shot. That’s what Chef Alex Hong of Sorrel and Arquet did this year with his team at the new Arquet booth. Giant chunks of lobster with brown butter and chives served inside of split-top buns that were toasted a little longer than usual made these lobster rolls hit decidedly different and about as good as one-offs get.

Shuggie’s -– Broccoli & Cheddah slice (right)

When I first swung by the Shuggie’s booth overlooking the main stage on the Polo Field, my jaw dropped at the massive ovens that would be churning out their pies at the fest. The Grandma- tyle thin half pizza squares were bursting with the whimsy that made Shuggie’s so much damn fun until they sadly announced the doors were closing. When I tasted the slice with broccoli leaves, stalk pesto, Calabrian chili, and aged cheddar, it made me feel like David Murphy and Kayla Abe definitely have some more tricks up their sleeve to unveil soon…

MEATS OF THE WORLD

Provecho – Smoked Brisket Bento (left)

Oaxacan fusion mastermind Eder Ramirez of Provecho was back for just his second year at Outside Lands and served up one of the most elaborate complete packages at the fest. The smoked brisket had an exemplary snap with a complex mole sauce. It anchored a loaded bento box that also came with huitlacoche crema, coleslaw, herb-roasted sweet potatoes, pineapple, and herby turmeric rice. There was a halibut version as well and Provecho knows how to give you a festival meal that will last through a good portion of the day filled with walking from stage to stage and dancing the night away.

Jaji x Tallboy – Sumac Fries with lamb (center)

The Hellman Hollow eateries stole the show this year and Jaji’s sumac fries loaded with lamb was our favorite dish of the festival. Sure, the sumac-dusted fries topped with cilantro chutney and vegan mayo stood on their own. But it was adding the healthy portion of lamb that leveled this up. Chef Paul Iglesias explained that he, partner/chef Sophia Akbar, and the team braise lamb shoulder that’s been marinating in a dill and cilantro marinade for three days. They then hit it on the plancha to order so it’s steaming hot and has a distinct crisp to it—I can still taste the melty, caramelized crust of the lamb because it was such a vivid flavor. This was a prime example of food tailored for a festival crowd that will make you want to visit a local restaurant, and I’m counting the days ’til I make a visit to Jaji in Oakland.

Reem’s – Lamb Quesabirria Flatbread Wrap (right)

If there was one item that more people in my orbit were talking about than any other, it was the “La Gringa” from the Mission’s Palestinian food luminary, Reem’s. This has been on the menu for years and it’s just an essay on how memorable festival food should be presented. Reem’s slow-braised lamb is wrapped in a lavash alongside Oaxacan cheese, pickled red onion, and parsley. It’s served with a decadent consomme for dipping to create an overall unreal offering.

BONUS ROUND: A BEVERAGE PROGRAM THAT SHINES

Beer Lands and Wine Lands have become such well-oiled machines at this point that each manages to have a completely different vibe. Beer Lands is on the far end of the Polo Field opposite the Land’s End Stage that feels like a brewpub with the greatest selection of local craft beer you can imagine. It’s also a great perch for enjoying the Queer programming at the nearby Dolores’ stage. I had standout beers from Bay Area breweries like Laughing Monk, Del Cielo, and Hidden Splendor. But it was the Anchor Steam homage in Leopard Mark’s Sunlight Groove Cali Copper Lager that I most enjoyed. Brewed by former Anchor Brewmaster Dane Volek, it fills the void the city will be feeling until Anchor decides to finally reopen. And while I’m not crazy about Leopard Mark’s kitschy can designs, the draft pours transport me straight to Potrero Hill.

Of all the canned beer options at the fest (tall cans of $20 Pacifico and Coors Light were consumed), the small Sierra Nevada Pils cans were the most fun. Sold for $9 at Sierra’s Hazy Hideaway, you can pretty much ensure that every sip of these 8.4-ounce cans is cold. Look, nobody wants to drink the last third of those 24-ounce big cans; this was the antithesis of that.

Last but not least is Wine Lands. I remember initially rejecting the notion of a wine tasting experience at a music festival, but what wine curator Peter Eastlake has helped shape Wine Lands into is one of the best places to hang out at Outside Lands. The wooded open corral-shaped wine bar features pours from over 30 NorCal wineries. Merriam’s 2025 Russian River Valley Sauv Blanc was my go-to sipper, with its distinct peachiness, Meyer lemon zest, and subtle herbaceousness. I even popped over to Wine Lands to watch Leon Bridges’ overpopulated surprise performance on the Duboce Triangle stage below and the vibes were always high and busy here.

In speaking about this energy at Wine Lands and the overall feeling of positivity in a year where Outside Lands sold out for the first time in years, Eastlake reflected on how drinking wine at Outside Lands offers a different feeling than how the wine world has supposedly seen better days: “It’s an anomaly out here. You can’t make broad comparisons with what’s happening outside of here in the wine industry,” he said.

And that felt like a metaphor for everything that Outside Lands weekend reflected about the state of the Bay Area’s food and drink scene. For three days, business was booming everywhere at the park and the Bay Area’s food and drink creatives showed the true colors of what makes this region globally revered.