While browsing the news paper our eye fell on an event we also got on Facebook that was fairly close by to where we live. Taste of Asia Festival in Het Park, Rotterdam. This festival promotes itself as The asian food festival in both Rotterdam and Amsterdam and as we finally had the Sunday free for a bit my mom and I decided to go. At arrival we noticed it wasn’t as big as we hoped it would be but still there were enough of different country stands that we could still our hunger. Taste of Asia is hosted/organized by vEvent who have organised the upcoming and previous Heroes Made in Asia (2023) and also organised Moshi Moshi fair in 2019.
Even the day was going to be warm we decided to go anyway, Taste of Asia festival started at 13:00 and we arrived a little bit past the hour, we came by car due to circumstances but there was a lot of space to park but also a lot of bike parking facilities. When we arrived a taiko group Yorokai played their first set. There were a lot of stands from different Asian countries. There were Indonesian, Thai, Japanese and South Korean stands to say a few.
We walked around the field for a bit before deciding on what we wanted to try first. We got some good Asahi beer from tap and went over to Takoyaki Goemon (Instagram + Facebook) We’ve had these before when we went to Volkenkunde Museum in Leiden for the Japan Festival. These guys are incredibly nice and make such good Takoyaki. We ordered one batch of 10 Takoyaki (savoury pancake type in ball form with squid/octopus; a Japanese street food staple) for €8 to share because we wanted to eat more.
Following this I personally wanted to try something from the Korean stand The Korean Town next to it where people kept queuing up we got the party mix chicken which was Spicy, Honey and Cheese fried chicken (€21 )and later on I tried their a Korean Corndog (€7,-) which oh my god it was good. There was a DJ playing some music, mostly lounge which I’m not a fan of, but there were a bunch of people dancing. We walked around a while more after eating our Takoyaki and chicken before we got some more drinks, another ice cold Asahi and I got myself a bubble tea from Unitea ( Facebook ). I liked that all you had to do to order from them was scan their QR code and order and pay on the website, or from a column in front of their stand. We also got some Indonesian Sate Kambing with rice and atjar (€10,-)to share from a shop whose name I unfortunately forgot which was also amazing.
There were so many more shops we wanted to try from but unfortunately we were absolutely stuffed but we noted them for future references to see if they have a restaurant so we can go there.
All in all my experience at this event was good, even with how small it is and at the time we went there weren’t a lot of people there but the event started at 1 o clock and ended at 8 o clock at night. Next time we will go for a much longer time and possibly with more people to share the great food of all the stall which were there. One of the one really catching our eye was Alice Thai because all the food looked and smelled amazing!
Taste of Asia festival will also be held in Amsterdam on Juli 15th and 16th. check the facebook event for more information
