Cyndi Himmelstiere applies deeply questionable scientific methodology to a free music festival’s food offering
Summer Sounds at King’s Cross is technically a free music festival, live concerts every evening, but let’s be honest about why I actually went, which is the food stalls lined up along the edge of the crowd. I decided, in a moment of genuinely questionable scientific rigour, to rank every single one purely by queue speed rather than anything so subjective as taste.
Stall One: The Noodle Van
Fast queue, properly fast, moving people through in under three minutes even at peak time, though I will admit the noodles themselves were fine rather than genuinely memorable. Efficient, reliable, exactly what you want when a band you actually came to see is about to start.
Stall Two: The Wood-Fired Pizza
Considerably slower, and here’s where my methodology started to properly break down, because the pizza was so good I didn’t actually mind the wait at all, which rather undermines the entire premise of ranking by queue speed in the first place.
Stall Three: The Dumpling Stand
Slowest queue of the entire evening by a significant margin, genuinely testing my patience and my ability to hear the actual music from where I was standing, but the dumplings were properly handmade in front of you, which goes some way toward justifying the wait if you’ve got the time to spare.
Where My Ranking System Fell Apart Completely
Around the pizza stand, if I’m honest, because good food simply makes queue length feel irrelevant in a way my original methodology hadn’t properly accounted for when I set out with such confidence.
The Actual Music, Briefly
Genuinely lovely, a proper mix of acts across the evening, though I’ll confess I spent a fair amount of it thinking about whether to queue again for those dumplings rather than fully focusing on the stage in front of me.
My Final, Deeply Unscientific Verdict
Skip the noodles, brace yourself for the dumpling queue, and accept the pizza wait gladly, because some things are worth missing a song or two for. I’ve already got Summer Sounds back in the diary for next week, purely for research purposes.