San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Eat with your hands at the Bay Area’s hottest unconventional food event
A carnival came to Napa recently. But this carnival didn’t have games, rides or funnel cake.
Instead, the main attraction was an overwhelming amount of meat.
For three consecutive nights, hundreds of spectators “oohed” and “aahed” over whole lamb smoked for 12 hours, then erupted in applause when a Bud Light was poured over it. They took out their phones to record the fiery torching of A5 Wagyu and marveled at the ingenuity of brisket stuffed into sweet monkey bread.
This was the Meat Carnival, a new kind of food festival that’s unconventional in the best ways. It’s theatrical. Carnal. Interactive. Intimate.
The all-you-can-eat event, which takes place monthly in the Bay Area, is a far cry from the recent trend of food festivals inspired by Asian night markets, where thousands of people are packed shoulder to shoulder and inevitably wait in long lines for food. Each Meat Carnival has only about 250 guests — making new friends is encouraged by the hosts — and a handful of food stations that people gather around, not line up behind. (Even refilling one’s wine glass is quick and easy.) Those luxuries do come at a significantly steeper cost of $195 per ticket.
You also won’t find any tired tweezer food here; the Meat Carnival epitomizes a rebellion against fine dining. There’s no cutlery or plates. Guests are directed to eat with their hands. Though timid at first, attendees didn’t take long to adopt new table manners. They’d rush the chef stations, grab fistfuls of meat and drop them straight into their mouths. Finger-licking was rampant and encouraged.
The Meat Carnival concept originated in Israel in 2016. Chef Itamar Abramovitch, an Israeli native and owner of the Blossom Catering Co. in Napa, brought it to the U.S. in 2023. He started with a test run in Austin, Texas, before launching the first California carnival in Livermore last June. The event has grown quickly, mostly via word of mouth and social media, with many guests coming from out of state and even out of the country. This year’s Meat Carnivals have all taken place at a secret location in Napa and sold out well in advance; expect to see tickets for the July event go on sale soon. Abramovitch said he’s working on securing a permanent Wine Country location.
Roughly 50 dishes were served on a recent Saturday at the last Meat Carnival, which means each chef’s station presented several recipes throughout the night. Ticket holders didn’t get a menu or schedule, and it was impossible to try every offering. Once an item was decimated by the crowd, it was gone for good. So only some attendees got to swoosh incredibly moist, roasted chicken through a tangy tahini, mango and chimichurri sauce. Others stumbled upon a fun twist on pulled pork nachos: brisket served with Parmesan
crisps, peach barbecue sauce and mint. And only the earliest arrivals had the chance to snag a date stuffed with smoked beef and drizzled with pomegranate glaze.
“We love introducing FOMO (Fear of Missing Out),” Abramovitch
said. “We take ‘all you can eat’ as a challenge and we will stuff you until you say, ‘No more, please.’”
There were some alternative dishes too, like faux gras, a take on foie gras made out of cashews
and yellowfin tuna scraped right from the fish’s ribs. Angel Montiel, an attendee from Green Valley (Solano County), declared the halibut crudo with pineapple and wasabi peas one of her favorite bites of the night. “This is the first time I’ve had halibut and my senses are like an explosion,” she said. “It makes me think of NASA. It’s like, ‘Pew! Pew! Pew!’”
Entertainment is taken as seriously as the food, said Abramovitch, who played the unofficial role of the Meat Carnival’s ringmaster. A live show preceded every dish, and the chefs often picked volunteers to help them cook. For the crudo, Abramovitch handed one woman a giant cleaver to chop up ingredients while he smacked a coconut with a mallet. Like at an orca show at SeaWorld, those in the front row found themselves in “the splash zone,” sprayed with flying juices. During another performance —
featuring a traditional Turkish kebab, a boombox and a singalong — the chef ordered the crowd to take a few steps back. Then he poured a sizzling pot of rendered beef fat over the pan, which erupted in smoke like a volcano science experiment.
“You can have great food all over the Bay Area. The diversity and quality of ingredients we have here are second to none,” said Abramovitch. “So the experience is the important part.”
The Meat Carnival facilitates an unusual intimacy between guests and the local chefs — including Mac BBQ, a Bay Area barbecue competition team — who are intentionally not of the celebrity variety. (The biggest name in attendance on this night was Bay Area barbecue master Jim Modesitt, who has been on several TV competition shows but was at the Meat Carnival as a guest.) Educational components — like a step-by-step demo of how to filet a fish — were accompanied by casual banter and innuendo. “The chefs are so cool. They’re really personal,” said Kevin Webster, a Napa local. “I like how interactive they are with you, and that they kind of talk s—, too.”
When Abramovitch’s volunteer got tired of pounding beef carpaccio with a mallet, for instance, he joked, “Are you usually done that quick?”
Just shy of 10 p.m., the remaining guests got to experience the Meat Carnival’s grand finale: raw Wagyu smothered with smoked caviar and bone marrow. Abramovitch called it “the Most Expensive Bite,” something that would be plated preciously at a fine dining restaurant, he argued, before he plopped greasy globs of the stuff into dozens of outstretched palms.