La Feria De Los Moles

I’ve been meaning to come to this event for a few years now… Over time I imagined it better than it was. I love molé so much that I really wished I had the belly and money to eat from every booth but alas it’s not that way.
I hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning so that I would be hungry when I got to the Feria. Bad idea, i was dizzy with hunger. which led to me making a horrible mistake in getting an order of tamales de molé from a Puebla booth. I really hate the taste of the «traditional» Mexican tamale. These were and then to make it worse each one had a very pitifully, small scoop of molé. Well money spent, I choked down the dry bids of massa till I mostly gave up and just picked at the meat and scrapped at the little splashes of molé. All the while this older couple are their lunch of molé tamales next to.
The lady looked at my plate with a sad sympathetic look on her face. She really felt bad for me. «Esos tamales no son buenos.“‘I looked at her plate following her eyes and hers looked a hundred percent different. She told me to throw mine away and she’d share one of hers with me. She explained that her tamales came from the Oaxaca booths. I couldn’t bring to accept her generosity as tempting as it was but I did want to taste. She insisted, so I cut a tiny corner and had a taste. I wanted to cry it was soooo good!
The difference between the two, the Oaxacan tamales are infused with molé.
So I walked around collecting business cards for future reference… Snapped some shots and got the hell out of there because there just way too many people there. But before leaving I got myself the right tamales to go and had a seriously delicious dinner that night!

My goodness I just noticed this was saved and I did not submit it!!! I’m a horrible Unilocaler =(
My review:
I am almost always a fan of fairs, but sadly this was an exception. It was way too crowded for its space from being over advertised. The lines were long and it was sooo hot!!! Hunger, heat, and longs lines??? Talk about a really grumpy me!
This event could have been so much better if they had better signage as well. I had no idea what each vender was selling so I had to make my way through a crowd just to read the menu. This was very annoying. And to make matters worse, I didn’t even know where a line began! Getting a good olé plate of mole was looking hopeless at one point. Luckily for my friends were able to get a plate.
The next problem was to find seating. Since tables, chairs, and a canopy were not provided, finding a shady ledge to sit on was like finding good real estate! Geez!
I am being very generous by giving this festival 3 stars. I loved the little food I actually had a chance to sample and a few business cards to potential restaurants.

Being a highly advertised event, I expected big crowds. It seems like the organizers did not because the layout of the festival was not crowd/​traffic friendly. Perhaps because of permits or something of the sort, the food tents were all bunched together which inhibited the flow of pedestrian traffic. In addition, CicLAvia was going on at the same time and cyclists for some odd reason, decided to attend the festival with bikes in toe, crowding the already limited space.
On the mole: Various types for purchase. Plates ranged from $ 6-​$ 10. The mole pizza was the most popular as observed by the long line.
All in all, the mole festival was about an hours worth of festival time; but touring the adjacent Olvera Street afforded another hour or so of entertainment.

i almost didn’t attend, being of the inclination to avoid crowds, food
festivals, eating outside standing up, the heat, etc.
luckily, my jones for mole, indeed a panoply of moles, overrode
my misgivings.
titled variously as the festival of mole (singular) or the festival of
moles (plural), the basic theme is the same: mole that rocks.
i managed to arrive at 10:30, snag a loading zone, which, unbeknownst to
non-l.a. natives, is a free space on sundays & holidays.
so $ 10 saved from not paying for parking, & more to spend on mole.
olvera street is virtually unrecognizeable from what it was ten or fifteen
years ago. since they’ve finished much of the restoration of the original
historic buildings, built a gazebo stage for performances, & otherwise cleaned
things up, you might almost think you were in mexico of the 1950s.
hit the mole tents, pronto, tasting all along the way.
preferred the mole w/​tamale-​in-​banana-​leaf of one sabores oaxaquenos, which
luckily, has a restaurant on west 8^th st., for future supping.
had some nice horchata at nieves xochi oax, whose sorbets looked delectable
as well.
v. happy to have ventured into the thick of a food festival for once.
yay!
go!