Atlanta Brunch Fest 2016

This past weekend, my co-workers and I spent our Saturday afternoon at the first annual Atlanta Brunch Festival. This event was super hyped up and I would say about 50% of my Facebook friends were either 1) Interested or 2) Attending on the Facebook event page. Let’s be real, who doesn’t love festivals and who doesn’t love brunch? It seems like a natural progression for this event to be a thing (especially in Atlanta! The brunch city!) and I’m surprised it took organizers this long to start it! Will I go next year? Keep reading to find out.

My group decided to go with the General Admission tickets. This got us into the event with 1 free drink and 1 free food item. After your first food and drink items were used up, you had to purchase food items for $3 and drinks for $5. Going into the event, I hadn’t done my research and was a bit surprised to find that additional foods were to be purchased separately. However, for the price, most food vendors offered pretty good portions – all portions were “samplers” so you could try all the food your heart desired without going overboard, and I appreciate that. The drinks were poured heavily and mostly large cups, however, I’m not really a big drinker and the lines were long (and I mean really LONG) so I didn’t partake in the booze past my first drink.

I ended up ordering one mango Mimosa (yum!) which was basically a full glass of champagne with a dash of mango OJ. Well worth the free drink price. 😉 I also went with an order of chicken and waffles and a chicken salad salad with fruit. Both were delicious and fresh! Many of the food vendors were physically flipping pancakes or kneading biscuits right under their tents. The offering of unique brunch foods (Fruity Pebble donuts) mixed with the old school offerings (chicken and waffles) was perfect and everyone found something they enjoyed: tacos, coffee, ice cream, pimento cheese grit sticks.

To be honest, I’d only attend next year if some changes were made to the event logistics. The lines for the bars were extremely long and, to me, not really worth the crowd or the wait. The price of the G.A. ticket (only including 1 food and 1 drink) were a bit overpriced to me. Unless there was more food allotted per ticket, additional entertainment (besides the live band, which was awesome!) or free swag with purchase (like a t-shirt or hat), the price could be a bit lower. Also, the park, while beautiful, wasn’t quite large enough or too many tickets were sold. Because the vendors were lined up in a circle around the park with many of the center greenspace taped off, the crowds were too large and funneled in one area, making it hard to walk around, see what food was available and even get the food itself.

All in all, for the first annual event, it seemed like a huge success! I’ll be interested to see how things change for the next year’s event and hope they take into consideration the venue or number of tickets available. If nothing changed, I may spring for the VIP ticket, just to get into the festival early, beat the crowds, and get more food.

Were you at Brunch Fest? What did you think?

p.s. Shoutout to my co-workers for being the most fun people to hang out with on the weekend and my company for allowing us all to do fun things together. 😉