Dan Silberstein, the man behind food-festival producer Drink Eat Play is working with a team to debut the Los Angeles Barbecue Festival in Santa Monica this weekend. Silberstein is in charge of all events, including a cupcake challenge, a gourmet kids' food party, and a dessert tasting.
What was the biggest challenge behind debuting this festival?
Working with the city of Santa Monica. They have a ton of stipulations; one department might not concur with another department. I had space issues—they quoted me for half the lot when in fact they only gave me a quarter of the lot. They quote you for a price, but then [charge additional fees]. They charged $600 per fire marshal per day, and paying police overtime was $120 an hour—and you have to hire seven police officers for seven hours.
What do you expect in terms of attendance?
Being [the festival's] first year, 7,500 to 10,000 would be a good number. I feel very comfortable with [that number] and the amount of space we have.
The response has been great. Most of our marketing is being done this and next week, so the people who have heard about it [at this point] are friends and friends of friends. What really inspired me to do guerilla marketing versus traditional advertising was that there was an event called Glow in Santa Monica—they had 200,000 people there without one dollar being spent on advertising. So we’re focusing more on guerilla marketing through Facebook, MySpace. We’re the most popular event on Yelp.com. We have 3,000 ticket[s sold] without any money spent on advertising.
How did you find the chefs?
I’m a huge barbecue fan. Basically, I Google searched the most popular restaurants [for barbecue] in different regions. We based it on what we read and [what we found] on the Food Network. These aren’t guys working from their backyards, these are nationally known barbecue masters that have very solid reputations in their own regions. We have representatives from St. Louis, Kansas City, and Memphis. Having three [nationally known chefs] is a good start, next year we want eight or nine. It’s interesting for L.A., being a city of transplants, to be exposed to different styles of barbecuing from different parts of the country.
What do you have planned for entertainment?
We have five different bands. On Saturday, we have more traditional, old-school country bands—the Palominos, a Johnny Cash tribute band, followed by a Beatles cover band. On Sunday, we have Country Gone Awry, which is more of a raw country band. The last band is Metal Shop, which is an '80s tribute band—if you’re a product of the '80s you would know their songs.
What are your plans for the future of the fest?
We definitely want to stay in L.A. We want to change location; we’re moving it to Culver City next year. We want to have a lot more vendors from out of state. I’m hoping that we will have eight to 10 really good names in barbecue come out. I’d love to have 75,000 people singing along to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and have this barbecue on a lawn.
