During a recent trip to Vien Dong Supermarket, I noticed a banner announcing a 3 day Tet Festival at Qualcomm Stadium. What a minute, did you say 3 day festival and Qualcomm Stadium! My immediate thought was, "man, that’s quite ambitious", after all I’ve been to many of these "Asian Festivals", and most have been really small. Like 12 booths small, with only 4 booths of food, and 1 of them is funnel cakes, and the other is a taco stand. So we wanted to make sure to attend, and arrived at about 2pm on Saturday:
We arrived to a pretty full parking lot, and were surprised at the amount of people. Admission was 4 bucks, and we entered and made a beeline for the food stands which took up a whole end of the festival!
Now I understand that the Vietnamese population in San Diego is topping 30,000, and I think they were all here! And all of them were talking on cell phones at the same time!
There were some pretty good size lines at most of the booths, but if you wanted Funnel Cakes or Tacos, there wasn’t a wait!
There was tons of food, so here are a few pictures.
The Vietnamese food ranged from Banh Mi to Noodles; but the one common denominator was Cha Gio; it seemed that every stand sold them. Either 2 for a dollar, or 3 for a dollar. The perfect festival food, we tried several, and they ranged from okay to fairly terrible. But this was a festival, right? Part of the experience is the ambiance. What spoiled the it for the Missus was the booth that sold these:
The gal at the wire mesh window(great idea BTW, keeps all sorts of critters and dust out); took cash from several individuals with Her bare hand, then proceeded to grab the Cha Gio and put them on paper plates with the same bare hand. The Missus just got completely grossed out, and made sure they replaced ours.
Many booths had various Chicken Skewers/Sates, which ranged from $1.50-$2.50 a piece:
This one had a nice lemongrass flavor.
Banana Fritters($1.00):
Fried Chicken Drumettes($3.00):
Crispy, but a bit on the bland side. Luckily a small container of sweet chili sauce was provided.
We had to leave a bit prematurely. A combination of being tired, dry weather, and maybe some dehydration, and blood started pouring out of my nose, which took a while to stop. Funny, it didn’t seem anyone noticed! Here are a few more photos:
And my favorite:
Some notes: The Tet Festival was presented by the Vietnamese American Youth Alliance of San Diego, and by and large was well put together. There were everything from carnival rides to vendor booths. But the one area I would suggest some changes would be in the traffic and parking control. Using teenagers to direct traffic didn’t really seem to be working, half of them were just "hanging out", while one Young Man was hurling insults, and other four letter words at Drivers while frantically directing cars, we were waiting for someone to come out and slug Him!