Updated: The La Cocina Street Food Festival!

Updated is a new Mission Local series that is doing just that: updating old stories to see what has happened to the people and places we have written about, like La Cocina. 

In August 2009, we shared this video featuring the first La Cocina Street Food Festival on Folsom Street in the Mission. The festival is an annual event featuring bites from La Cocina’s immigrant entrepreneurs. By 2015, some 70,000 people had attended the festival, which grew from fitting on one block to covering more than a mile. 

After outgrowing Folsom Street, La Cocina moved the festival in 2016 to a roomier locale: The Power Station at Pier 70 in the Dogpatch. The festival has remained there since and celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2019.

La Cocina did, however, take a one-year break in 2017 to rethink the festival and, coincidentally, the organizers were re-considering the festival once again this year before the pandemic forced them to postpone any celebration at all.

“We were looking at a different kind of food event this year, not necessarily a festival, but something that was still iconic to the work we do and that represented our chefs of color and diverse cuisines and cultures,” said Aniela Valtierra, director of operation & events at La Cocina.

For now, La Cocina’s events will be online. 

Keep an eye out for the virtual version of La Cocina’s F&B: Voices from the Kitchen in mid-October. 

And, in the meantime,  La Cocina is helping its entrepreneurs navigate the tumultuous food landscape created by the virus. Part of that means raising money, and so far La Cocina has raised over $700,000 through its website, here. 

As for the video’s reporters, Betty Bastides is a documentary filmmaker living in New York, and Andrea Valencia works for Apple as a linguist and recently created Mission Local’s bilingual site.

Enjoy the video from 2009 and the memories of what we have to look forward to.

See all in Updated.

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