MySliceFest was billed as “London’s largest outdoor pizza festival – a music festival combined with some of the craziest pizzas imaginable.” Sounds good huh? I’ve been to music festivals before. I’ve eaten pizza before. I think I’ve eaten pizza while listening to music. But I’ve never had pizza at a music festival, so obviously I was prepared for my mind to be BLOWN. Or something… I don’t know… I don’t trust anything anymore…
I need to start this post with an apology. Here at Methods Unsound towers we get a lot of requests to cover various different events and openings but we try to be a little bit selective and only choose to write about things that we would be interested to do ourselves, and things that we think you might like too. While the music on offer wasn’t necessarily to my taste, MySliceFest promised us loads of exotic pizzas, from hot dog and fries pizza to dessert pizzas, and as we’re always on the lookout for new things, this really ticked all my foodie boxes. So we promoted it a little bit. We thought it might be good… but it turned out to be a terrible disappointment. And for that I must apologise.
MySliceFest took place for one day only this weekend on Saturday 30th July 2016, near Wembley Park Arena. Doors to the festival opened at noon, but we figured going at lunchtime was a terrible idea so we arrived at 3:30pm. Before we even entered the gates I could already sense this was not going to be a great time. For starters, it was one of the most depressing places I have ever been to – it was in a fucking car park. Although the MySliceFest website did state that the ‘festival’ would be next to Wembley Stadium I don’t think that anybody was expecting it to actually be in a fenced off corner of the car park surrounded by building sites and derelict factories.
This was the image of the ‘festival’ that was being promoted on the MySliceFest website:
Don’t they look like they’re having fun! In the sunshine and in a green field!
THIS was the reality:
Not quite the same ambience.
Admittedly the weather was a bit grey, which they of course couldn’t predict, but this was far from the worst thing. Once inside the gates we did a quick circuit of the festival which didn’t take long as it was pretty small. The main stage was off to one side of the car park with a very small crowd of people in front of it, and an airstream trailer was parked up a short-ish distance away to the right of the stage with a couple of DJs inside pumping out music to about four people. My husband joked that maybe that was second stage? And sadly this turned out to be true.
Ignoring this minor disappointment, we tried to get our hands on some of the pizza we’d travelled so far to eat. Then we noticed the queues. The great big, long, winding snakes of queues at every pizza vendor in the place. Considering that MySliceFest had said that this would be “largest outdoor pizza festival” in the UK you would have expected them to have a shit ton of pizza ready and prepared for people to buy, right? Especially as their website (and a security guard I spoke to) said that they were expecting 10,000 people through the gates that day.
The reality was that I only counted five pizza vendors at the whole festival and most seemed like pretty small scale operations who were definitely not up to the task of feeding the thousands and thousands of hungry people who were queuing up to eat pizza at the same time.
We joined one of the massive queues (I think it was maybe for Pizza Oven but it didn’t matter) and soon noticed that the only time the queue moved was when people got bored and left. There was little to no pizza being produced as far as I could see. After we had been waiting for around 15 minutes (not moving) a guy came up to us and said that he had been waiting in the exact same queue for an hour before he got to the front to order, only to be told that he then had to wait in a separate queue for another 45 minutes before his pizza would actually be ready. Understandably, he looked pretty pissed off, and roughly said:
Don’t waste your time in this queue, it’s a fucking joke! You’d be better off leaving and going to Pizza Hut.
I began to suspect he was right. This is a video I took of the queues of people waiting for pizza around 4pm:
I asked a couple of other people who were near the front of their queues how long they had been waiting and all of them told me “over an hour”. That was enough for me. Realising that everything was pretty shit, and being fairly hungry now with no hope of getting any food at MySliceFest, we left after less than an hour. We decided to get the tube back back to Canada Water and go to Street Feast at Hawker House instead. It was the best thing we ever did. That’s right: sitting on a tube for another hour was preferable to standing in a queue at MySliceFest.
I later found out that they ran out of pizza at 5pm!! WHO HAS A PIZZA FESTIVAL AND RUNS OUT OF PIZZA AFTER FIVE HOURS?!?
Here are a smattering of other equally unhappy people who took to Twitter only to be completely ignored by MySliceFest and get no response from them whatsoever. Weirdly they only seemed to be responding to the positive tweets. Funny that.
So there you go. In summary I would say that MySliceFest was a total shit show. To be bill an event as a ‘festival’ and then hold it in a shitty carpark is bad. To bill an event as a ‘pizza festival’ and then run out of pizza at 5pm so half of your punters go home hungry is unforgivable. And considering that tickets were being sold for £25 – £50 each for VIP access (which included no pizza but a marginally better loo) I think I am being very lenient here. I hope that the creators of MySliceFest are hanging their heads in shame today.
I would recommend you not to go, but mercifully it’s already over.
Discover a much better foodie experience in our London street food section, including the eight best street foods to eat at Street Feast Hawker House.