matthew’s alibi

A man dressed as tofu stands next to a bored looking Asian girl dressed as a cookie.

I’ve been wondering where my pre-registration pack for this year’s LA Tofu Festival could be, so I went to the Tofu Festival web site so I could at least save-the-date.

I was not prepared for the sinking feeling I got when I read:

Thank you for your many years of support. We’ve enjoyed delicious tofu dishes with you under the sun for the last twelve years and thank you for helping to make the LA Tofu Festival one of the top food festivals in Los Angeles. As redevelopment in Little Tokyo and Downtown Los Angeles continues to boom, venues for such a large scale event have become scarce.

As they say, all good things must come to an end and so the Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC) says farewell to the LA Tofu Festival. We hope you will continue to frequent the restaurants, shops and events in Little Tokyo.

Nooooo! How can this be?  (Clearly I’ve not passed the denial stage of this yet.)

It’s too bad that the organizers are no longer able to make this event work in Little Tokyo (although it seemed clear that last year’s festival was much reduced from its former glory.)  It just seems like such an evidently good thing for the neighborhood.  But, maybe the festival is a victim of its own success.

The Tofu Festival provided the sort of surreal sun-drenched cultural hodgepodge that feels unique to this city, and it was one of the first things that made me love Los Angeles.  (It was surreal.  Along the lines of, “Check out this roasting hot parking lot.  They got soy in the shape of gourmet ice cream!  And soy in the shape of a sausage.  And soy milk.  And soy bread.  And soy noodles!  And here comes the tofu ninja…  And there’s Iron Chef Morimoto signing his TV dinners!  And Blackalicious is playing!  And there’s an impossibly tiny child eating her weight in tofu in the tofu-eating contest… and… and…” and then you collapsed from the nasty combination of heat, sake and a bellyful of tofu.)

Summers just won’t be the same.