Few food vendors at Coachella are local. Organizers won’t say why.

According to its website, Coachella plans to feature more than 60 premier bars and restaurants across Indio Central Market and the rest of the festival grounds, but Everbloom Coffee, a stylish cafe on Highway 111, seems to be the only local business on the official roster. Instead, the lineup is dominated by what Coachella’s press release refers to as “Instagram-friendly” and “buzzworthy” pop-ups.  

Despite repeated attempts for comment, Coachella press representatives declined to tell SFGATE how they selected food and drink vendors, or whether there were other local establishments selling on site that weren’t publicly listed.  

The festival’s lengthy restaurant lineup shows that nearly all vendors are from the Los Angeles area — and the food that gets hocked on the polo grounds doesn’t come cheap. 

One user on TikTok went viral after claiming that two coffees and two burritos cost $64, and a combo meal from Texas rapper Bun B’s Trill Burgers runs $27, according to SFGATE reporters. Festivalgoers can also opt for $150 tasting menus, and there’s plenty of trendy chain restaurants like Broad Street Oyster Company and Bay Area Thai favorite Farmhouse Kitchen to choose from. If they want a more extravagant “culinary experience,” attendees can even shell out $395 for a 16-course “new wave nigiri” dinner or throw down $350 to drink an aperol spritz in a “VIP rose garden.”

Coachella press representatives declined to say how vendors are chosen or whether they’ve conducted outreach to nearby establishments. Either way, one thing is evident: The food lineup is seriously lacking in local flavor, a shame given that Indio is steeped in Latin culture.  

Originally a lonely railroad stop between Yuma, Arizona, and Los Angeles, the city became an “agricultural powerhouse” in the 1900s when inventive farmers figured out how to grow crops like onions, cotton and dates in the hostile desert climate. In turn, immigrant families crossed the border to capitalize on the area’s growing economic opportunities. Years later, Mexican communities are still integral to the town’s identity. Fifty-four percent of households speak a language other than English at home, according to the United States Census Bureau, and the number of “minority-owned” businesses nearly rivals the number of nonminority businesses.  

“Currently, 67% of Indio residents are of Hispanic origin,” Bryan Montgomery, Indio’s city manager, told SFGATE in an email. “These residents have brought elements of their culture, including food, music and religious traditions — all of which have been woven into the unique and culturally rich fabric of Indio.”  

According to Montgomery, Coachella is a major boon to the local economy: He estimates that the town rakes in $2.5 million from ticket sales and an additional $5 million in sales taxes and transient occupancy taxes around festival season each year. However, the average person in Indio still makes just $31,000 annually, and about 14% of the population lives in poverty, census data shows. The Coachella Valley Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that builds housing for low-income families, wrote that more than one in 10 families in the valley live below the federal poverty level. 

Even though Coachella is a lucrative business opportunity, it’s still unclear how local vendors can get involved. 

“The Festival organizers have their own staff and network of vendors with input from the Chamber of Commerce and their local staff,” Montgomery said. 

“I doubt there is much need for outreach — my guess is that they get many applications to become vendors,” he added. Montgomery said he doesn’t know how much it costs to set up shop on the polo grounds, but suspects that the return is “significant.”  

Meanwhile, there’s a wealth of restaurants in the area that could have benefited. 

For instance, family-run Rincon Norteño, which has served the valley since 1964, has reportedly earned a cult following among locals. Just a mile away, there’s Taco Shop 760, a funky outpost on Calhoun Street that serves $2 soft tacos and fusion birria. Then there’s Tacos Gonzalez, which humbly operates out of a strip mall but garnered hundreds of Yelp reviews lauding their delicious, affordable street tacos — a far cry from the “casual modern Mexican dining and drinking experience” at Coachella’s exclusive 12 Peaks VIP area. (According to the festival’s featured list of restaurants, a few other establishments that serve Mexican food include Tacos 1986 from SoCal, which offers Tijuana-style tacos, Cena Vegan, and Taco Party, a mysterious vendor that serves “Mexican-American inspired” fast food, though little is known about it.)

Indio also offers traditional Chinese fare, like sizzling pork kidney, duck tongue and beef tripe: In 2022, Palm Springs Life’s Lizbeth Scordo highlighted CIE Sichuan Cuisine for its spicy boiled frog — an authentic Asian dish simmering with heat and flavor that’s rarely found on U.S. menus.

When Coachella rolls around, bedazzled tourists practically take over some restaurants. Sloan’s, a quaint neighborhood diner in Indio that serves a menudo special on Sundays, told SFGATE that they serve breakfast to 1,600 customers in one day during Coachella weekend. Prudencio Flores, who manages and operates his nearly 100-year-old parents’ restaurant, said Rincon Norteño also sees a spike in customers.

“It does get crazy,” he said. “Monday and Thursday are the worst.” Despite this boom in foot traffic, it’s not all a net positive. Attendees actually drive out local clientele, he said.

“What happens is you get all the tourists and concertgoers that come to Coachella fest and come through to your restaurant, but then you lose all the people that live here,” he said. “They really stay away from all the places because they get too busy.”

But 30 years ago, Flores said that he landed the catering gig of a lifetime when a customer approached him and asked if he’d be interested in serving breakfast, lunch and dinner to the crews at a scrappy concert in the desert. When Flores agreed, he didn’t realize he’d be catering the first iteration of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival that we know today. “So that’s how I got my foot in on the first concert of Pearl Jam,” Flores said. 

“We ended up feeding up to, I think, 1,000 plates a day,” he continued. For the next 18 years or so, he said that he and his staff would serve the groundskeepers and late-night cleanup crews chorizo and eggs, tacos, taquitos and even American and Chinese food. “Anything you can think of because you didn’t want them to get bored.” 

When asked how much the gig paid, Flores burst out laughing and simply replied, “It was really good.” 

About four years ago, that all came to a halt. “They got rid of the local vendors,” Flores said, explaining that the festival is an in-house operation now, despite his assertions that Indio is a hub for quality Mexican food. When SFGATE reporters arrived at the polo grounds, they spoke to five vendors who came to the desert from Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana. 

There did appear to be a couple more desert businesses — they were just tucked away in the campground lineup and left out of major marketing materials. One, JavaGogo, is owned by Barnett English, the founder of the Joshua Tree Music Festival. English has been slinging coffee at Coachella since the beginning, he says, and is perhaps best known for selling a drink called the Funky Monkey: a rich espresso blend with maca, banana and pink Himalayan salt. “It’s a meal in a cup, it’s yummy,” he said.  

Even though it can be challenging and costly to set up a booth at the festival, English said that vendors who apply and land a spot are essentially “paying for the opportunity” to be in front of 125,000 potential customers. 

Another local restaurant is FiveO3 Papusas, which started as a food truck but is slowly settling into a brick-and-mortar location in Cathedral City. The owner, Tito Pinto, said he was able to sell homemade Salvadoran food at the festival because he forged a working relationship with Best Beverage Catering, the company that helped organize Coachella’s food and drink vendors.

“It’s all about who you know, not what you know,” Pinto said. He wasn’t aware of anyone else from the valley at the polo grounds.

Local restaurants probably aren’t involved for a number of reasons, Pinto explained. He agreed that the selection process is murky, but local restaurants are also probably not concerned about expanding to catering, or they’re simply not putting themselves out there enough, he said. 

“I feel like if they made themselves known then there would be an opportunity,” he said, “because you can find almost any type of food here from, you know, pizza, hamburgers, to paella from Spain, or obviously pupusas, which is what I’m doing — all different ethnicities are here.”  

Regardless, business owners like Flores said they were grateful for the opportunity to work behind the scenes during the concert’s early years. And if he got the chance to sell food at the polo grounds tomorrow, he absolutely would.

“I never turn away business,” Flores said. “Whatever it is they need me to do or whoever needs me to work, I would do it. I would make it happen.”