What to love... and wonder, at Outside Lands
And some life-sustaining momos
Fog and live music is an excellent recipe.
Outside Lands is many things as a festival, but cookie cutter it is not. It invites a wide range of music into a rare backdrop that showcases San Francisco’s moody, natural appeal.
When people criticize San Francisco — sometimes accurately, but often because it’s been designated as middle America’s vision of a liberal hellscape — I can say with a high degree of certainty those people have not visited its parks.
There is plenty San Francisco can and must improve. But what it excels at, and what endears me most to this city, is the breadth and variety of its parks.
To host a music festival in its grandest, Golden Gate Park — originally a swathe of sand dunes in the 1800s, then dogmatically turned into a forest — is a testament to what is right about the city.
The bad first
The festival’s flaws are obvious (bad news before good, always).
Firstly, they’ve added more bathrooms, but there always seems to be disastrous line for port-a-potties. That’s more of a note than something that’s easy to fix.
There absolutely should be more public transit and a better exit route. People get packed like sardines through precarious gates leaving the festival and there are only the usually scheduled bus lines in the area instead of festival-specific bussing.
The busses get swarmed, dangerously.
It also leads to a lot of Ubers and self-driving cars attempting to weave around and to young, drunk people wandering the Richmond.
That should be consciously looked at from a safety perspective.
Another safety concern is that the main stage added a sizable filming tent in the front-middle area of the crowd, so that the only way to reach the front of the stage is to work your way left through a mosh of mostly teens and 20-somethings, who are willing to fight harder than you to stay there.
It’s a legitimately worrisome setup in terms of crowd crush concerns.
Because of a VIP section to the right, that central part of the main stage is packed deep with one, thin escape route. It’s not a particularly enjoyable experience, having six-foot-something teens bump into you from behind because no one has room to move.
I would also argue that the sound could be improved. Maybe it’s my own ears, but the vocals for Kendrick Lamar seemed low and muddied, which didn’t seem to be the case elsewhere. Maybe that’s on each artist — J.I.D. sounded fine with a far sparser crowd, earlier in the day — but it shouldn’t have been a strain to hear his lyrics.
But main stages are main stages. It’s usually going to have some issues.
Every other stage, though, is stellar.
That is, aside from the SOMA tent, which I never made it to — and which apparently never arrived itself.
Over the course of the weekend, I received a half-dozen notifications about the SOMA Tent. The first one informed festivalgoers that the tent had collapsed. There were further issues, which culminated in the decision to make the tent “open air.”
I understand why they had to call the SOMA Tent a “tent” despite the tent part of the equation being absent. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s an oxymoron.
What’s to love
One of my favorite memories is leaving the main stage track and weaving through McLaren Pass to the forest, where many of the food stands are located. They’re tucked under a canopy of eucalyptus, in front of the Music Den.
Festival food is magnificent. It gives a chance for local vendors to shine and put themselves on the map, though they do have to deal with young, drunk people.
We did a quick survey of shortest line to best food ratio and landed on momos, where I got the combo plate of gurkha chicken with rice and momos above, from Bini’s Kitchen.
It was genuinely life-changing. I cannot recommend momos highly enough. Any dumpling is good, and momos are probably under-appreciated in the dumplingsphere solely because they’re un- or under-known.
I can’t recommend Bini’s highly enough, and would strong recommend for lunch at the edge of the Financial District and/or if you’re waiting to catch BART at Montgomery STation.
And while it’s always tough to give a fair rating to food when you’re desperately hungry and inebriated, this wasn’t drunk food.
Nepalese food in general seems to go underappreciated.
There’s a place called Urban Momo in San Mateo that is now my go-to post-Warriors spot because it’s the only non-traditional fast food open until 1:30 a.m. You can get a plate of biryani, tikka masala, naan and momos for under $50 and have it sustain you for the following day.
Never underestimate the power of a momo.
Aside from food, the bright spots are the Toyota Den, which pains me to type out. It’s actually the most intimate venue at Outside Lands, tucked in the forest, close the stage, with a bright variety of balloons to look up at for all the sober folks in attendance.
The other favorites are the Sutro Stage, which is ideal if you want to sit on a hill with a little bit of space to yourself. It tends to feature younger, indie artists.
But the best combination of intimate stage and vibes are found at the Panhandle, which is far enough away from the second main stage at Twin Peaks to not feel too crowded.
I saw JPEGMAFIA there with a bunch of hyped teens in 2021 and it was unparalleled. Samia was lovely there this year. It’s a stage that’s big enough to draw a solid crowd while also small enough to allow artists to interact with the crowd comfortably.
Aside from this being a festival that can get annoyingly crowded — and deservedly so — it’s hard not to love what it offers. There are major headliners, down to recognizable artists worth getting excited about, and those artists you think you’re the only fan of who you’ll probably be able to see without having to fight too hard.
And again, fog. It’s incalculably more enjoyable to be able to wear a fleece to a festival than be sweating your ass off all day.