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Food

The Bay Area’s Cutest Food Festival Is Throwing a Lumpia Party

Luke Tsai
Harajuku Foodie Fest comes to the Cow Palace in Daly City.
Children dressed up as Pixar and Disney characters pose in front of a giant stuffed Totoro.
Kids dressed as Disney/Pixar characters pose for a picture with Totoro at a past Harajuku Foodie Fest event. The Benicia-based festival series combines anime, kawaii culture and local street food vendors. (Courtesy of Harajuku Marketplace)

Samantha Larot’s idea for the Harajuku Foodie Fest was a simple one: By the summer of 2023, she’d been throwing successful food and craft pop-ups for much of the pandemic, starting with a handful of vendors outside her plant shop in Benicia and eventually moving to the nearby City Park when she outgrew that space. She’d also been a lifelong lover of anime, Japanese art and “kawaii” culture — everything cute and pastel pink.

Why not combine the two?

So was born the first Harajuku Marketplace, in August of 2023, and it drew such a huge, enthusiastic crowd — more than 13,000 attendees from all over Northern California — that Larot knew she had to do it again. (“It was meant to be a one-off,” she says.) Now, Larot hosts the self-described “cutest foodie marketplace” in the Bay two to three times a month, both in Benicia and beyond, catering to the (very large) subset of Bay Area food lovers who also dabble in cosplay and Hello Kitty merch.

“They’re nostalgic characters for our [generation],” Larot says. “A lot of our parents who grew up in the ’90s bring their kids, so it’s fun for them too.”

The latest iteration of the festival, which will be held at Daly City’s Cow Palace on Saturday, Jan. 18, will have an additional theme: It will double as a lumpia party. As Larot notes, one of the main differences between the Harajuku festival and other Bay Area manga or anime events is its emphasis on local street food vendors — 30 in all for Saturday’s event. It’s at least as much a food festival as it is an anime marketplace. As for the lumpia theme, Larot explains, “I’m Filipino. And I wanted to start including some of my culture.”

Left: a food vendor shows off a box of lumpia. Right: a festival attendee dressed as a character from 'One Piece' holds a tray of skewered meats.
Left: A vendor at a past edition of Harajuku Lumpia Fest. Right: A festival attendee dressed as Monkey D. Luffy from ‘One Piece.’ (Courtesy of Harajuku Marketplace)

For Harajuku Lumpia Fest, that means a whole host of Filipino food vendors, running the gamut from Lasang Pinoy, a traditional street food vendor hawking meat skewers and classic lumpia Shanghai, to Lumpia Bucket, which is known for selling massive buckets of lumpia either layered with chicharon or overloaded, Jack in the Box–style, with lettuce, sour cream and cheese. Plenty of non-Filipino vendors, including longtime Harajuku favorites like Vallejo’s Sushi Obsession (known for its “sushi nachos”), will also be in attendance.

And since this is, at the end of the day, an event focused on cute merch, the first 500 attendees will receive a free lumpia-themed tote bag, and the first 150 will receive a Lumpia Fest T-shirt.

On the art side of things, Larot says the Harajuku events are also much more locally focused than most anime conventions. “Some vendors will have Pokémon, Sailor Moon and Studio Ghibli,” she says. “But we also have local artists creating original artwork that you’re not going to find anywhere else.”

Two festival attendees dressed like anime characters.
Festival attendees are encouraged to come decked out in their most ‘kawaii’ outfits. (Courtesy of Harajuku Marketplace)

The Jan. 18 festival is actually a makeup rain date after the original event was washed out by the spate of wet weather in mid-December (though the Cow Palace is an indoor space, many of the food vendors set up outside). Given the catastrophic wildfires that have swept through Los Angeles in the interim, the festival is also offering tickets that include a “The Bay Loves L.A.” fundraiser tote bag, with proceeds going toward fire relief.

Harajuku Lumpia Fest takes place on Saturday, Jan. 18, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., at Cow Palace (2600 Geneva Ave.) in Daly City. Tickets start at $5 with online early registration.

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