Last weekend, we noticed that the street a block south of us was closed down on Saturday morning, and it looked like there were some chalk artists working there. Starting on Sunday morning, we noticed an ever-increasing stream of people walking down toward the drawings, and discovered that it was time for yet another Little Italy street festival – Festa!
Pre-Festa, we started out the morning well, with a delicious brunch of corned beef hash. We had already enjoyed three days of Reubens using our home-corned beef, and on Sunday we combined them with homemade hash browns for a super-easy and super-yummy corned beef hash.
By the time we made it to Festa in mid-afternoon, it seemed like every single person from the greater San Diego area was there – it was crowded! There were gigantic lines at all of the food booths, so even though the Philly CheeseSteak booth smelled really really good, we opted to save ourselves half an hour and skip it. The coolest thing we saw at Festa was a cooking demonstration by Nick Stellino, whose Mediterranean Flavors was one of the first cookbooks I owned (and is the source of my favorite baklava recipe!).
My other favorite part was the chalk drawings – all of the artists created images that were trying to capture the spirit of Italy:
After walking around for a little bit, we decided to escape the crowds and grab some gelato at Pappalecco before heading back home – yummy!
