What is the Taste of Chicago?
It’s a one-street, four-block food festival on Columbus Drive with roughly 56 exhibiting restaurants and a number of non-restaurant vendors. Unlike the Taste of Buffalo – the second-largest food festival, a two-day mid-July affair with roughly 450,000 attendees – the Taste of Chicago runs for ten days and supposedly draws around 3.5 million people. We say supposedly because admission is free, there are no obvious attendance counters, and the crowds on day one didn’t seem as dense as we’ve seen at Buffalo’s event over the years. Yet we wouldn’t doubt that this event draws more people given that it runs for five times as long, has been operating annually for 29 years, and has a number of things going for it – lessons that Buffalo could learn from, going forward. Ticketing. Though admission is free, food tickets are required to purchase anything you want to eat or drink. Items range from 3 to 10 tickets in price, and have an on-site purchase value of 67 cents each – they’re sold in bundle
