The Great Googa Mooga...

This weekend saw the first 'Great Googa Mooga Festival' take place in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

It was a festival of local food and drink and great music, run by the people who run the Bonaroo music festival and curated by a group of world class New York chefs and other foodie types from Brooklyn.

The tickets were FREE, and all sold out instantly, so we were lucky to be quick enough to get some online - once we arrived at the festival is was clear why they sold out so fast...

Prospect Park was heaving for food fans all wanting to try what was on offer.

The idea was that 75 food vendors from around New York would have a stall and would serve one signature dish from their restaurants - there were also beer vendors and wineries there, as well as all sorts of other people doing food related stuffs...

 The whole thing was designed and put together so well - they had all sorts of great things around the festival, all branded and designed in the Great Googa Mooga style. The whole site was separated into different 'Experience' zones - they had the Hamburger Experience, The Pizza Experience, The Coffee Experience, The Sweet Circus and lots of other areas. Naturally we headed straight for the Hamburger zone!

 We joined the long queue to try a cheeseburger from The Burger Joint... rumored to be the best burger in NYC! So we had to try it. The verdict... it was pretty pretty delicious, I think we'll have to go to the proper restaurant, but it was definitely up there with Shake Shack (our No.1 NYC burger).

There were pretty huge queues for each and every stall, but they moved fairly quicky, we waited about 15 minutes for all our food. The fun thing was that they had people who held up signs saying how long it would be til you'd be eating the food (like at Disney)...

They also had signs saying 'This line is fine' or 'We're here to wait with you!'... so it made light of the situation and I think helped keep people from being too grumpy about the queues.

After our delicious burger, we went for a wander round the festival to see what else was on offer...

 We'd downloaded the Googa Mooga app before we went and were able to make a list of all the food we wanted to try (most of them were burgers or sandwiches!), then you could tick them off your list and rate them and write a review... it was all very cleverly put together.

The next delicious food we sampled was from James Restaurant - they were serving up some amazing fried cheesecake bombs, small balls of deep fried cheesecake mix... they were DELICIOUS!

Tucked away in a very special corner of the festival was the meat-lovers paradise that was Hamageddon!

This little piggy was actually a huge huge spit roast over, with a real little piggie rotating inside...

The hog inside looked so delicious and crispy, and I bet it tasted incredible, but it was spinning around the whole time we were at the Festival and still going when we left...

As well as all the food they had some great bands playing too, on the Saturday the Roots were headlining and pulled a big crowd...

The headline act on Sunday was Hall & Oates! A bit of a strange choice, but it takes all sorts I suppose.

The whole festival was absolutely amazing - so well designed and so well curated and the atmosphere was brilliant too, everyone was sitting enjoying the incredible weather and the delicious food, listening to the great music and just enjoying themselves.

There were some people who were moaning about some of the food selling out and some people moaning about the queueing times... but for a FREE festival that's so close, with such great food and music, I don't know how anyone could complain really. It was a great success in my eyes and I REALLY hope they hold another Googa Mooga next year.