A lot of people found themselves bewildered on September 9 after a disastrous event called the NYC Pizza Festival. Some attendees had paid up to $75 for the food fest which turned out to yield nothing more than cold, kiddie sized portions of pizza served on paper plates in a parking lot across the street from Popeye’s at Knickerbocker and Flushing Avenues. 

“The Fyre Festival of Pizza” made the internet rounds for a news cycle or two, reaching at least as far as the Daily Mail in England, and blogs briefly got busy coming up with dough related puns for a pizza related scandal. Aside from Gothamist conducting a brief interview and running a black and white photo of the organizer’s smiling face near the top of that site for a day or two, no one really bothered to ask much about the man behind the fest, Ishmael Osekre, whose history with ill-fated food events was already established after 2016’s widely panned NYC African Food Festival. 

Scheduled at the same time, and in the same place as the Pizza Fest was an event called the NYC Burger Festival, promising “‘mountains of French Fries, Oceans of Ketchup and Waterfalls of Beer.” And the gift for grandly braindead evocation was as Trumpian as Osekre’s jumbled description of what went wrong in an interview with Gothamist: