MySlice festival slammed by pizza lovers after huge queues for Wembley car park event where food ran out
Furious food fans have slammed a pizza and music festival at Wembley Park, describing it as a "farce" and demanding refunds.
Punters took to social media to vent their anger at My Slice Fest on Saturday lamenting hour-long queues, its location in the corner of a car park, pizza running out four hours early and poor sound quality.
The debut festival, described as "London's biggest pizza party" and "a day full of fun, food and a dash of mayhem... guarenteed to deliver", cost £25 in the general release and £49.50 for a VIP ticket.
Organisers admitted today the event had not lived up to their “high expectations” but insisted some people did enjoy the festival.
Toni Ratcliff, food writer for Methods Unsound, a pop culture website, described it as "serving up hot slices of pure disappointment".
She said: "Although the MySliceFest website did state that the ‘festival’ would be next to Wembley Stadium, I don’t think that anybody was expecting it to actually be in a fenced off corner of the car park surrounded by building sites and derelict factories.
"An airstream trailer was parked up a short-ish distance away to the right of the stage with a couple of DJs inside pumping out music to about four people. My husband joked that maybe that was second stage? And sadly this turned out to be true.
"I only counted five pizza vendors at the whole festival and most seemed like pretty small scale operations who were definitely not up to the task of feeding the thousands and thousands of hungry people who were queuing up to eat pizza at the same time."
She added: "I hope that the creators of MySliceFest are hanging their heads in shame today."
Cult garage duo DJ Luck and MC Neat were among the acts who performed at the festival, alongside DJs including Dean Eg and Swerve from Kiss FM. Organisers Xclusive Touch also advertised 15 pizza vendors, offering exotic flavours such as waffle pizza and dessert pizzas.
However, a torrent of aggrieved festival-goers demanded refunds on social media, claiming all pizza ran out at 5pm, four hours before closing time.
Anyone heading to #myslicefest should reconsider! Refund please @TicketmasterUK
— Ruth Grosart (@Roo_fi_o) July 30, 2016
Chris Wheatley, 34, a sales and relationship manager based in Wandsworth, told the Standard: "The main issue was the lack of organisation, the lack of vendors, the lack of what was promised.
"From 3pm onwards the queue for one slice of pizza was minimum one hour.
"We queued for an hour and a half only to be told, when we were six places from the front, that they had just run out.”
"Even the Man versus Pizza contest was a joke, it was delayed starting and there wasn't enough pizza," added Mr Wheatley, who had two friends fly over from Belgium for the event.
Another, Amanda Hughes, contacted the organisers and ticket vendor to request a refund, but is yet to receive a reply.
#myslicefest great idea! Until you spend more time queueing for food than actually dancing & the venue is a car park.
— Sophia Sinclair (@Sophia_Sinclair) July 31, 2016
She said: "The sound coming from the stage was all over the place, clashing and sounding extremely poor.
"There were actually five pizza vendors not 15. The queues were out of control, we queued for two hours at one pizza vendor, to eventually find out that their oven had actually broken, choosing not to tell anyone in the queue.
"We left just a few hours in, hungry. Extremely disappointing, given I travelled to it and bought these tickets for friends who flew over from Ireland for the event."
Holly Pemberton, from Surrey, tweeted: "@myslicefest was an absolute joke 2 hour queues to get pizza & sit in a car park - how do I get a refund? #false advertising."
Slice no2, queued 40mins for this. I've never left a pizza before in my life but couldn't finish this #myslicefest pic.twitter.com/V7iJJMDEF6
— Jennifer McGee (@JenniferMMcGee) July 30, 2016
A spokesman from Wembley Park said: "We’ve made contact today with MySliceFest, the promoter and organiser of the event, to find out more about the issues raised.
"We understand they are responding to complaints on an individual basis and we will be monitoring the situation."
A spokesman for the festival said: "We're really sorry some people felt the queues for pizza let down their experience of MySliceFest on Saturday.
"We're an enthusiastic and committed events company and what we delivered didn't live up to our high expectations for everyone.
“We take this very seriously and will be replying individually to everyone who has taken the time to get in touch. In spite of this, thousands of people did enjoy our unique festival of music and pizza, and we'll be learning from what worked and what we needed to improve on as we go forward."
ArticlePeppero-no! Fury at 'shambolic' pizza festival in Wembley car parkwembley parkPizzaFestival