• Peter Tsai
  • Baconfest 2015 in its full glory.

“You know you’re in the first world when you’re at Baconfest,” said the man at the Kanela Breakfast Club table, just before handing us plates of bacon-infused loukoumades, Greek doughnuts covered in maple syrup sitting in some sort of thick bacon paste. He gave us forks, too, but said we shouldn’t use them. “You need to eat it all at once to get the full bacon experience!”

There were 70 restaurants serving up small plates at Baconfest on Friday night and a sold-out crowd 1,500 people, some dressed as gigantic strips of bacon, who had come to the UIC Forum to eat them. For the past week, the festival organizers had been importing 8,000 pounds of Nueske’s bacon from Wisconsin, 50 pounds at a time. The aroma of frying bacon hovered over the intersection of Roosevelt and Halsted. I imagined it looked like a pig-shaped cloud, but that was after I’d been inhaling it for a couple of hours and maybe it was starting to do strange things to my brain.

But we also liked Osteria Via Stato’s hand-rolled cavatelli, Chicago Hospitality’s BLT skewer, Pure Kitchen Catering’s bacon bulgogi, Salted Caramel’s bacon popcorn (which I had seen at my local farmers market the weekend before and rejected as too pricey, but this experience changed my mind), the Palmer House’s bacon brownie, and Black Dog Gelato’s chilled affogato float, which somehow tasted refreshing. (This probably says something about the state of our tastebuds at that point.) We tried beef bacon and bacon made from an Iberico pig. Both were very good, though the Iberico bacon wasn’t noticeably different from American bacon.

Baconfest is one of the best-planned events of its kind I have ever seen. Even though there were 1,500 people in the room, I did not feel claustrophobic or homicidal. There was usually someone with a garbage can nearby so you could dispose of your plates and forks. There were also composting stations and helpful workers who instructed you on which bin you should use. There was plenty of water, because bacon is salty. Best of all, out in the hallway, there was a seating area with comfortable chairs, where you could sit and digest and regroup before facing the bacon again. You could also play Foosball or cornhole or use a selfie stick to take your picture with a cutout of Kevin Bacon. But most people just sat.