Laguna spends every summer being a postcard, and then on one October evening it stops performing and throws a party for itself.
More than thirty of the town's own kitchens set up inside the Festival of Arts grounds, the same grounds where the art actually lives, and pour unlimited tastings while a band plays and the canyon cools off around you. You drift from plate to plate as the string lights come on. The chefs are standing right there rather than behind a pass, which changes every conversation you have about the food. It is twenty-one and over, it is unhurried, and it carries the specific magic of eating an entire town's worth of good cooking in one place in one night.
Laguna Canyon Road, an evening in early October.
This is for the person who believes a good meal on a warm night is the entire point of living here. They are right, and this proves it.