East Nashville Tomato Festival

This Saturday was one of my favorite days of the year. The East Nashville Tomato Arts Festival! Full of food, fun, arts and crafts, it's a big celebration of living on the East side. At 7:30am I ran the tomato 5k. After a quick breakfast and a shower I was back down at five points to start enjoying the fun.

The first thing that I passed was 5 Points Pizza selling their delicious pizza in front of their store. I had just eaten breakfast and it was 10am, but I was really tempted to dig into a slice. There is something about street fairs that just makes me more hungry than I normally would be. I kind of regretted not getting my brunch slice, as the line was down the block by about noon. The racks of pizzas were empty! They couldn't keep them in stock.

Then we wandered over to the stage behind Margot for a pet fashion show. The stage was low and the crowd was big. I was too short to see any of the cute puppies. Also, I guess we missed the whole "costume" part. What I saw was cute dogs wearing bandannas that were up for adoption. Good thing Steve was there to prevent me from taking them all home.

 

There were a lot of wacky arts and crafty type stuff for sale on the street. My favorite art pieces were hanging in Art and Invention Gallery (Which ALWAYS has lots of beautiful things). I was obsessed with a set of small animal busts made by local artist Elizabeth Foster but by the time we got there all six of them were already purchased! Major bummer. I guess my favorite piece of art was also everyone else's favorite piece of art.

Do you notice a trend? Lots of stuff in East Nashville has mustaches on it. It's the Portalandia equivalent of put a bird on it. Love East Nashville? Put a 'stache on it.

Then we headed over to the Green Wagon for some beer and music. They had a $15 bottomless cup of local beer for the entirety of the festival. We thought this was awesome, but after we got the cup we found out that we couldn't leave their little patio/stage area. This forced us to hear some ok bands and one not-so-ok dude with a guitar. But the patio was fun, the crowd was nice, and we ran into a few friends.

For lunch I had a pork bahn mi from the Sum Yum Yum food truck. There is no picture of that because I ate it so quickly. I honestly never had this food truck before, but their lines were the smallest and they seemed well organized so I went for it. The bahn mi was tasty- I really liked their carrot slaw. I also felt it was one of the healthiest options of all the deep fried and biscuit filled options. Steve went to Riff's Fine Street Food and had this AMAZING BLT. Gosh, it was perfect. The bread was toasted and there was some type of creamy avocado/spinach sauce. Really sad I only got one bite of this.

What I really like about this event is that everyone brings their dogs along. I'm constantly asking strangers if I can pet their dogs and give them a big old squeeze. We met this nice couple while waiting for our food from Riff's that had two Italian Greyhounds, and one was this sweet puppyface! He was so small and he smelled so good. I'm happy I got to snap a pic with him.



The best thing about the festival is getting to spend time with your neighborhood friends. Since everyone comes down, it's nice to catch up with people. I got to spend some quality time with some of my favorite hooper ladies! 

This is one of the best street festivals I have ever been to. If you are planning to visit Nashville, I highly recommend coordinating your trip around the Tomato Fest. You will get a really good feel of the city and the wonderful people that inhabit it.