Taste of St. Louis

God is so good! At the end of a stressful week for both David and I a couple of weeks ago, St. Louis had its annual food festival, Taste of St. Louis. If you know David and I, you know this is right up our alley. We love to eat yummy food, and its one of the things we most enjoy doing together. We missed this festival last year when we had just moved to St. Louis, so this year I made sure we made plans ahead of time to make sure we didn't miss it this time around.

It turned out to be a gorgeous fall day, and the festival itself couldn't be more perfect. There were more than 75 different restaurants with booths (pretty overwhelming, really) with everything from hamburgers and pizza to the catering company for the St. Louis opera house selling fancy hors d'oevres. The whole thing happened downtown, and from the beginning we both said how much we enjoyed just the feeling of the city. We started out our time by walking all the way through the main restaurant row, and looking at all the offerings. It was really hard to pick out what we wanted to try--waaay too many choices! But we both ended up settling on things we had seen at the very beginning. I got a yummy turkey salad slider and gourmet fries to share with Sarah, and David got some pad thai (he is still in search of the best pad thai in the city) and some bbq wings.

Everything was delicious, but I have to say the wings were every bit as outstanding as they looked!

I love this photo of David and Sarah with the arch in the background. Please forgive the dab of bbq sauce on the corner of David's mouth--this was a food festival after all!

After we'd had our fill, we took Sarah to the kids area, where she got to meet Dora, Cinderella and Strawberry Shortcake. Somehow I ended up with just this one photo, but believe me she enjoyed all three meetings. They had several fun little booths set up for kids, giving away free balloons and a bunch of other stuff. It was definitely worthwhile to go as a family! There was so much more that we didn't even get to explore--a whole wine tasting area, and next time we will be sure to bring bigger appetites to this event! The most random area of the festival was an entire section devoted to promoting Texas tourism! They had a stage and a big trailer and this whole interactive show-thing. We didn't go through it, but I am guessing this thing just travels from festival to festival throughout the country. It was just so random--there weren't any other state-themed travel attractions, just Texas. But it looked pretty cool--guess its a creative way to get people interested in coming to Texas. Can't wait to see, and taste, what will be there next year!