Harry Potter, how not to run a street fair, and bar food

The new Harry Potter book was, of course, released at midnight Friday night and apparently 4,000 showed up outside McNally Robinson Booksellers on Stephen Ave. They turned the street into Diagon Alley (or something like that) and it all sounds really cute. Thanks to the parents who brought kids out to the scary downtown that night instead of taking them to sanitized events at Chapters. I don’t know what Diagon Alley looks like, exactly, but I can bet it’s nothing like Chinook Centre.

So Brian and I were downtown on Saturday, had lunch at the always-delicious Han’s in Chinatown (303 Centre Street, in the City Centre mini-mall- the end of the corridor off 3rd Avenue), and went to McNally’s and bought the book.

I finished it at 6:00 this morning.

No worries. No spoilers, yet. I’ll just say that it was satisfying, and I’m glad to have my life back, but a little sad too. I also saw the new film (book 5) a week or so ago and was a little disappointed with the choices made about how to deal with such rich, and lengthy, source material. The film of book 7 comes out in 2010, so that’s something to look forward to.

Sunday was a street festival called “Sun and Salsa Festival” that takes over the Kensington area, which is a very nice, pedestrianized neighbourhood just NW of downtown. It’s sort of reminiscent the Annex in Toronto or the Glebe in Ottawa. Here’s a photo thread of it, compliments of “Surrealplaces” at skyscraperpage.com. As you can see, the area has great character and should be able to put on a great street fair.

They try, and they screw it up. This street fair has a THEME, which is idiotic for a diverse little area like this to begin with (unless that “theme” is pretty vague and inclusive), and the theme has nothing, not a single thing, to do with the community. The theme? Why, salsa! People (75,000 people) line up to but $3 bags of commercial tortilla chips and wander around to taste salsas prepared by various restaurants and other businesses. This is wrong for so many reasons.

1. The neighbourhood has no “Latin American” aspect at all, nada, aside from one absolutely horrible “Mexican” resto that was imported from that Mexican-food paradise known as Edmonton.

2. Instead of using this opportunity to promote local businesses and the BRZ, some among those businesses that might need some promoting, they’re ALL forced to push aside their “normal” offerings and make SALSA. Tibetan restaurant? No, you may NOT promote your delicious momos! You have to make SALSA. Sushi places? Put that rice away, nobody will be allowed to come near your bread and butter; you’re making that Japanese delicacy known as SALSA today.

3. There is NO FOOD! There are many of the aforementioned salsa stations, but what about lunch, what about sampling the cornucopia that is usually provided at these sorts of festivals? Nope, salsa for you or nothing.

4. The fest starts at 11 and ends at, God help us, 5:00. Sure, you could stick around and while away the evening on a patio there, but that’s true any day. Ending a “street fair” at 5:00, in July when it’s light until nearly 10:00, is STUPID.

5. Salsa Fest was the same time as a REAL Latin American event at Olympic Plaza, which I, of course, missed because I was at farking Salsa Fest.

6. People who read this might be offended because the chips are donated and this events makes money for charity. Well, look, you can collect money for charity if you want a themed charity every year- you can have collection points or you can charge merchants a small percentage of REAL food sales. I read in the paper today that Salsa Fest made $2500 for each of two charities. This is, I am sorry to say, pathetic. This event does NOTHING for local businesses, it does NOT promote Kensington at all, and the charity aspect can be accomplished with my suggestions here. $5000 for an event that attracts nearly 100,000 people is terrible.

I’ve usually missed this thing because it usually happens on the Sunday of Folk Fest. Not this year, and not last. Last year I was enthralled by the size of the crowd, I guess, and I came home with strong recommendations to everybody to check it out next year. Now, I’m embarrassed to have done that. It’s pointless, the whole thing, and a waste of an opportunity to do a great street fair in Calgary’s best inner-city neighbourhood.

So we left this fiasco and had lunch at a pub called (I’m sorry) the Regal Beagle. I am too much of a child of the ’70s not to be ashamed to admit this. But here’s the thing- THANK GOD FOR THE SMOKING BAN! This is one of those places that serves superb, cheap, abundant pub grub and I had never set foot in because of the damned smoke. Now we got to revel in fantastic chicken wings (”hotter” among the menu options) and nicely-cooked burgers with a mound of delicious fries… the burgers are served on grilled ciabatta, a great delivery system. Mine was melted swiss and ’shroom, yum, and although nothing on our plated was remotely “healthy,” it was very tasty, honest food that we can finally enjoy in smoke-free comfort. Happy ending to a disappointing morning.