Those of us who lived in San Francisco in the last decade remember the ever-popular SF Street Food Festival — which thanks to widespread coverage on radio, web, TV, and in print was an immediate, very crowded success in its first year, and only grew from there.

The SF Street Food Festival began as a two-block affair on Folsom Street, off of 24th Street, but very quickly had to expand after its inaugural event in 2009 became a raucous shit-show of Millennials clamoring for tasty, reasonably priced bites. By its third year, it spanned four blocks, from 22nd to 26th Street, and took over the grounds of Cesar Chavez Elementary School as well.

The festival began as a benefit for La Cocina, the kitchen-incubator non-profit focused on BIPOC women-owned food businesses that began four years earlier. And as such, its first vendors were primarily nascent small businesses that were ill-prepared for the massive crowd that showed up.

The festival was then named the Best Food Festival in the Country by CNN, which only added to its draw. And by 2016, it was taking its first hiatus, having gotten too big to be sustainable — the 2015 iteration featured over 100 vendors, and drew an estimated crowd of 80,000.

Former executive director of La Cocina Caleb Zigas said at the time that the decision to take a year off was reflective of some growing fatigue around food festivals in the Bay Area generally, and about how the size of the fest had made it harder for their individual small-scale vendors to make money.

The SF Street Food Festival returned in smaller form in the fall of 2017, relocating out of the Mission to the Potrero Power Station, along the Dogpatch waterfront, where it stayed for three iterations, until the pandemic hit.

Now, after another five-year break, it is back next month as La Cocina rings in its own 20th anniversary, and it’s in a new location: the new China Basin Park. The park, across McCovey Cove from Oracle Park, is a beautifully landscaped waterfront area next to the new Mission Rock development.

This year’s SF Street Food Festival will take place November 8 and 9, from 11 am to 6 pm. The festival’s two-doze-plus vendors include those who got their starts at La Cocina before making names for themselves in the Bay Area, including Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement, Reem’s California, and Bini’s Kitchen. See the featured vendors list here.

General admission tickets to Saturday or Sunday of the festival are $12, plus taxes and fees, and two-day tickets are $20. You can find those here.

There are also “all-access” packages that come with food and beverage credits.