Photo: Galdones Photography
Consider us cautiously optimistic about the direction the Taste of Chicago is taking. According to the Tribune, the plan (besides cutting the number of days down from 10 to 5) will cut about 20 of the roughly 60 restaurants. Instead, there will be three to six pop-up restaurants per day. Between them, these two moves should help to weed out some of the lamest vendors while hopefully encouraging some better vendors who didn't want to make deep-fried turkey wings in the hot sun for 10 days to give it a one-day shot with better, more creative food. That said, the price is getting a little steeper: the fee for participating as a standard vendor remains $3,000, even though it's a shorter event, and the real cost is that the city will now take 18% of gross sales, up from 16% last year. (Popups won't have to pay any upfront fee, but will fork over 20% of gross sales.) [Tribune]
