Ryan Sebastian now knows that bacon is the third rail of the food industry. Touch it at your own risk. Sebastian’s food truck event company, Moveable Feast, brought over 12,000 people to the first annual San Jose Bacon Festival of America this past weekend—overwhelming vendors with about 5,000 more attendees than expected.

“We have fairly good data from previous festivals,” he said. “We’ve been doing this for a while now, but the Bacon Festival was just way beyond that.”

Despite having no advertising beyond social media, so many people showed up that lines grew too long and trucks started running out of bacon. Eventually, festival organizers had to start turning people away.

“It was just insane,” Sebastian said. He also credited heavy local media coverage to the large turnout.

PHOTOS: Images from the San Jose Bacon Festival of America

The event’s Facebook page is rife with angry festival-goers. Writes one: “I stood in one line for 40 minutes and 25 minutes in they announced they were out of a bacon dish… It was freakin’ 6:00 pm! Bacon Festival my ass! It was the worse [sic]! I knew something was wrong when the smell of bacon did not engulf the parking lot or festival! I would like a refund!”

Sebastian is well-aware of the criticism (valid and otherwise) and is currently working on responding to the flood of emails and posts he has received since event, in addition to granting refunds. Moveable Feast will also be pushing out a survey to festival-goers about their experience in order to better understand what people expected and their concerns were.

“We pride ourselves on doing excellent events. This was a definite black eye for our company,” Sebastian said.

When asked why he thought the festival had gotten so out of control, Sebastian couldn’t really say. Other bacon festivals around the country have experienced similar problems, he pointed out. Maybe there’s just something about bacon that gets people sizzling.

So what does that mean for the San Jose Bacon Festival of America 2014? “We have to decide whether we want do it again,” Sebastian said. “It’s one thing to turn a profit, but if it’s at the expense of what people think of our company, then it’s not worth it.”

The first ever San Jose Bacon Festival of America brought over 12,000 bacon-lovers together, with live entertainment and an a mechanical bull to accompany, at the San Jose Flea Market.

Photos by Metro photographer Alex Stover

Before Ryan Sebastian, co-owner of Moveable Feast and Treatbot, decided to create San Jose Bacon Festival of America, a large-scale food truck event themed entirely around bacon, he was leaning toward doing a sriracha festival, since everyone around here, he figured, had tried sriracha at some point, thus making it an instantly recognizable, fun themed event. Only problem, he learned, is that although most people may visually recognize sriracha, few knew it by name. (For the record, sriracha is the red hot sauce with the rooster on the label found at nearly every Asian restaurant.)

So Sebastian went with something even more recognizable: bacon.

AUGUST 30: UPDATE: Here’s the “bacon team” lineup for the San Jose Bacon Festival of America:
333 Truck
BBQ Kalbi
Bigg Shrimp’n
Blast Off
Chutney Mary’s
Cluck It Up
Eat on Monday
Fairycakes
Fish Taco Wabo
Frozen Kuhsterd
Grilled Cheese Bandits
House of Siam
Louisiana Territory
Madd Mex
Me So Hungry
SF
MoBowl
MoGo BBQ
O Mi Ninja
Pacific Coast Highway
Road Dogs
Rocko’s Chocolate Tacos
Soulnese
Super Tacos
El Conrro
Takoz Mod Mex
Taqueria Angelica
Tastee Bytes
Treatbot

After the success of Sebastian’s other food truck event, San Jose Taco Festival, which celebrated its second year last May, he was looking for a secondary event that would be even easier to promote. Bacon seemed the obvious choice.

“We wanted to do something that was a no-brainer. We’ve done very little marketing for bacon festival. We’ve been extremely lax about promoting the event because the response is through the roof. Someone says they’re going to go and five people comment on their Facebook post, like ‘I want to go too!’” Sebastian says.

In other words, bacon is popular.

For a lot of attendees, all they need to know about the San Jose Bacon Festival of America, is that there will be bacon—and lots of it, but there is so much more to Sebastian’s bacon festival than just bacon. Like Taco Festival, which plays on Mexican themes, bringing in Mexican wrestling rings and air accordion contests, the bacon festival is also a tongue-and-cheek cultural heritage festival, but this time it’s old timey America.

“We’ve been wanting to do this very Americana, state fair theme that I personally like. I love parades and stuff like that. Bacon goes perfect with that. The joke is that we’re trying to make a festival that is nostalgic for a time that never really existed,” Sebastian explains. “I’m glad I live in this time. The past wasn’t necessarily best for everyone. So I think it would be great to celebrate it, while having a huge diverse group of people come in to the festival.”

There will even be square-dancing. Most people attending bacon festival presumably have never square danced before. The goofy, over-the-top nature of the festival almost gives people who would never otherwise seek it out a free pass to give it a try.

“Square dancing is a legitimate form of cultural expression. I think we should at least try and expose it and get people to try and participate,” Sebastian says. “We’ll have marching bands and a petting zoo and some other fun kinds of things that in some parts of the country would be really normal. In San Jose they almost became kind of exotic. Pin the tail on the donkey isn’t played very much. We’re looking at this as a fun, retrograde event with marching bands and kazoos and bacon.”

Sebastian’s vision goes even beyond creating a fun Americana-bacon themed event; he wants to breathe new life into the very notion of what a food festival experience can be. The key is to make the guests more active participants in the activities and to create unexpected experiences.

“It’s a lot different than the typical festival, where there’s posters of dolphins and a classic rock band. If you go to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, it costs $17 to get in. People sit and kind of listen to the music, but maybe not. We’re trying to break that whole model,” Sebastian says.

At Bacon Festival, the marching bands, for instance, will be playing in the crowd. And if they happen to play a song you like, there will be thousands of kazoos lying around for anyone to pick up and join the band if they so desire.

“We’re trying to innovate and really try to make these a unique experience. It’s not going to feel like your typical festival,” Sebastian says.

Of course the Bacon festival is at its core a food truck festival. All the vendors will be either food trucks or mobile carts. They are not required to have bacon in every dish, though no doubt there will be plenty of bacon items to choose from. The only rule the vendors have to adhere to is that no dish can be over five dollars—that way people can afford to try several items without spending a fortune. There will be over twenty food trucks, and a lot of them will offering food they don’t normally sell, both with and without bacon.

“It’s going to be a mix of different things. For some people, they may not want to eat five pounds of bacon in one sitting, or at least one day. There’s going to be a lot of different options,” Sebastian says.

Marching bands won’t be the only form of live music at Bacon Festival as several local bands are also scheduled to play. So far the lineup includes Sweet HayaH, Usurper Vong, Dreams of June and Relapse.

The debut of Night Market in San Jose was a success with thousands attendees visiting booths with local vendors and food trucks.

The Asian-style open-air market was held Saturday in Berryessa across for the San Jose Flea Market. Inspired by the night markets of Taiwan, Ryan Sebastian, owner of Treatbot ice cream and karaoke truck, helped organize the event with Moveable Feast and San Jose Made participants. Night Market returns every Saturday until September 29.

Photos by Metro photographer Jessica Shirley-Donnelly.