The viral Cake Picnic™ will return Sunday to “San Francisco’s newest neighborhood,” a collection of luxury apartments on the manmade land mass Treasure Island that, until recently, was a floating military biohazard. Yum!
The event’s founder, food blogger and Google UX program manager Elisa Sunga, has boasted that entry to her event is “harder to get than a Taylor Swift concert ticket.” But if drama, long lines, and lots of rules aren’t your cup of tea, Bess Greenberg and Sidney Kalouche will be hosting their second free cake picnic at Fort Mason that same day. (Sunga did not respond to our request for comment.)
The friends failed to secure tickets to the Cake Picnic™ Legion of Honor event in March (despite setting alarms and refreshing the page the second it struck 10 a.m.), so Greenberg, 28, and Kalouche, 27, decided to cook up their own cake event. They learned other would-be cake picnic attendees were also shut out in the comments section on the event’s Partiful, so Greenberg and Kalouche made an open-invitation page for their event and posted the link in the comments section. It quickly attracted a few hundred RSVPs.
Kalouche, despite helming the big cake party, had hardly baked cakes himself. “Honestly, that cake that I made for the cake party was like, maybe one of the first cakes I ever made,” he said. “And then putting the event together felt like making a cake in itself.”
The first official Cake Picnic was held at Potrero del Sol Park in 2024. Sunga wasted no time leveraging its virality into a monetizable endeavor. Its third San Francisco event at the Legion of Honor — the one that Greenberg and Kalouche, among dozens of others, failed to secure a $15 ticket to — drew nearly 1,400 people to the museum grounds for what turned out to be a lot of queuing and photo-taking. Picnicgoers said check-in was at 9 a.m. and cakes were not cut until close to noon. Some used icing recipes that can withstand heat, and “some were not so lucky,” one Redditor said. After arranging the cakes on the tables and taking a million photos, folks were split into small groups and given exactly 5 minutes to grab as many slices of cake as they could.
Even spillover attendees of the sanctioned event were among the 200-odd people that wound up at Greenberg and Kalouche’s Fort Mason renegade gathering in March. “They said that you kind of just wait in line and take pictures and stuff. I think ours is more grassroots which might be a little more fun,” said Greenberg.
Greenberg said she was a bit panicky the week leading up to the event given the hundreds that expressed “going,” “interested,” and “maybe,” online. Ultimately, three picnic tables, a stepladder for town square-style announcements, and the help of some early attendees made the event a sweet success.
“A bunch of, like, different generations came. It wasn't just our age or peers,” said Kalouche. “It was very cool.”
Folks from all walks of life (and parts of the Bay Area) showed up. A husband and wife drove up from Santa Cruz and made a weekend out of it. A young daughter and her parents came with a full picnic spread. Some hobbyists brought cakes decorated to the nines, while others came with simple classics. A few people went in full Marie Antoinette-style dress. One picnicgoer painted the scene en plein air. Some rebels disregarded the cake theme entirely and came with cheesy sourdough, a welcome savory dish amid a sea of confection; people in the comments on the upcoming event’s page are already begging for them to make it again.
The upcoming Cake Picnic™, which costs $30, also sold out in seconds. The waitlist for the San Francisco Cake Picnic Club (the function of which is not entirely clear) is 6,268 deep. The theme is gold, evoking the branding of its glittery corporate sponsors, Guinness and Ghirardelli. I also suspect TSA is a silent partner, given the 500-word rules list, ticket transferability restrictions, and identification requirements.
Greenberg and Kalouche, for their part, said they’re preparing even less than the first time for this weekend’s cake picnic that already has 500 RSVPs, including one from this reporter.
In fact, Greenberg and Kalouche weren’t aware of Sunday’s official event until attendees of their March outing hunted them down: “I didn't know that the other one was happening, so on Partiful I was getting messages like, ‘Are you guys doing it again?’” said Greenberg. “And we were like, yeah, sure."
As a general rule, they encourage each group — not individual, unlike the Cake Picnic — to bring a cake. No lines, no government-issued IDs — just people who love to bake and eat. You won’t be frisked at the door, and you won’t be turned away.
“Once again we proudly say F the Cake Picnic™ for selling out in 2 seconds!” Greenberg and Kalouche wrote on the event invite, careful to include the trademark lest they get reported for not honoring it, which Sunga urges followers to do via a special email address. “The more the merrier!! Bring a picnic blanket, sunscreen, forks, Lactaid, maybe some paper plates, yourself, and a delicious CAKE!”
