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2013 LAFW tee. From Flavour Gallery.

If you’ve been to some of the country’s major food events, including LA Food & Wine, LA Times The Taste, Pebble Beach Food & Wine, and New York City Wine & Food Festival, then you’ve seen Flavour Gallery‘s T-shirts. The vintage wash and modern prints make these event shirts way cooler than the typical festival apparel.

Flavour Gallery has also teamed up with celebrity food personalities, including Chris Cosentino, Andrew Zimmern and Jenn Louis, to create unique food-inspired designs. Remember those stylish LudoBites T-shirts the pop-ups’ staffers wore? Those were Flavour Gallery’s, too.

Husband-and-wife team Erin and Alfredo Malatesta founded the company a couple of years ago after 10 years in the fashion industry as an expression of their love for food.

“We had spent many years designing and manufacturing for other brands and wanted to create something that was near and dear to our hearts,” Erin said. “At the time, there was no lifestyle brand focused on food — something that you would wear to express how passionate you are about cooking, being a chef, festivals or wine.”

If you order a shirt online, it’ll arrive wrapped like a piece of freshly butchered meat (this is a good thing), like so:

Flavour Gallery package

This style, called Classy Utensils, features some on-trend neon print on a soft burnout tee. I received a size medium, and Erin was right when warning me that this style runs small because even the medium is snug. I recommend a large if you like a looser fit.

Classy Utensils T-shirt

While I’m generally not a big fan of tees with graphics, Flavour Gallery’s shirts are fun stuff for those of us who enjoy food and food-related things. That’s me, natch.

Note: This shirt was complimentary.

This past weekend will go down in L.A. food history as The Weekend That Was The Clusterf*ck Known As The L.A. Street Food Fest. Don’t get me wrong — I thought it was a great idea, and I enjoyed myself while I was there. But as is the case with so many first-time events, there were problems, though I guess things could have been worse.

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I was so excited to finally — finally! — eat at LudoBites, which eluded me in its last incarnation at BreadBar over the summer. So when Esther of e*starLA generously opened up her reservation to a bunch of her blogger friends, I happily signed on. And I had never been to Royal/T Cafe, the location for this LudoBites pop-up, so I was expecting all kinds of new experiences.

And then I got sick.

Now, I felt fine except for a ridiculously stuffy nose. After making sure I didn’t have a swine flu-like fever, I decided to still go to dinner. After all, who knows when I would be able to eat at LudoBites again, especially since reservations for the 2.5 week run sold out before opening night? So I went, determined to make the best of it.

I arrived at Royal/T not really knowing what to expect and was pleasantly surprised by the eclectic art installations and gift store that had Hello Kitty Rubik’s Cubes on Christmas trees. The night was already off to a good start.

And then I took my first bite of food and realized I couldn’t taste anything. Damn you, stuffy nose!

So I’m at LudoBites, and I can’t taste anything. Other than running to the restroom periodically to blow my nose in the hope that I would clear enough to be able to taste again, what was I to do? I decided to make the best of it and make the experience an exercise in textures (!).

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