TRAVEL: GILROY GARLIC FESTIVAL JULY 2010

My birthday gift for 2010: Attend the world-renowned Gilroy Garlic Festival in the Garlic Capital of the World, Gilroy, California.  This three day summer event features every kind of food you can make with garlic - including ice cream - along with live music, arts & crafts, cooking demonstrations and contests.  For over thirty years Gilroy has hosted the Garlic Festival with 100,000 people attending in 2010.  Ted and I managed to squeeze in with the other 99,998 people on Saturday, July 24.  Our first impression?  It's ungodly hot in Gilroy in July.  Fortunately, this was quickly overtaken by our second and most lasting impression:  this is the most efficiently operated event I have ever attended.  Keep in mind that I have worked for Disney, and hope to convey how completely impressed we were with the operation of the festival from the parking to the signage to the service.  After being whisked from the dirt parking lot packed with friendly attendants in an air-conditioned bus to the entrance gate, we made our first order of business beer and wine, followed immediately with food.

Calamari, one of my favorite foods in any form, became a recurring theme for the day, much to my delight. One sample down and 44 to go, we moved on to cooking demonstrations.  The cooking demonstration stage was stadium bleacher style, shaded by canopies and set up with giant video screens and live camera feed so you could see the actual cooking.  We caught Andrea Froncillo, the chef owner of the Stinking Rose restaurant in North Beach, San Francisco (and now Beverly Hills), and author of the Sex and the Kitchen website.  Chef Andrea demonstrated short rib, pork chop and garlic mashed potato dishes from his restaurants. Personable and funny, Chef Andrea spent most of his stage time bantering with fellow Italian and celebrity chef Fabio Viviani of Top Chef fame.

Chef Andrea on the left, Fabio seated at table, pointing.

After all that cooking, it was time to eat again.  After a beer refill, there was more calamari for me and decadent and delicious french fries for Ted.  But not just any fries, Garlic Crab Fries consists of fries drizzled with a creamy remoulade sauce and topped with shredded crab.  We followed this with the traditional free garlic ice cream cone.

Garlic Crab Fries

Key Lime CalamariWe noticed that many of the food vendors were operating to raise funds for local non-profits like schools, police and churches.  The Gilroy Rotary Club operated a wine-tasting pavilion and the festival's sponsors included many local businesses.  The festival also operated 6 recycling centers throughout the grounds to capture all those plastic ups, and the disposable plates and utensils were compostable.  The festival centerpiece is Gourmet Alley, where local foods are featured.  The cooks of Gourmet Alley are one of the most popular attractions at the festival with non-stop flaming, grilling, and sauteing of Monterey Bay squid, Morgan Hill mushrooms, San Francisco pasta, regional chicken, and wild-caught American shrimp.

In the Garlic Grove you could learn to braid or top garlic and acquire free garlic growing kits.  Piles of recently harvested garlic were dumped in the grove and sorted for demonstrations.  In addition to growing kits, my souvenir for the day was a garlic braid for my kitchen, of course, but I also lucked into a Stinking Rose t-shirt that my husband snagged out of the air when Chef Andrea was showering the crowd with swag from his restaurants.

The crowd had grown exponentially by the afternoon and the heat was causing me not to eat as much as I should (!), so we mixed it up with some live music.  Ted kept asking when ZZ Top was scheduled to play, but we had to make do with some local jams.  And speaking of jamming, I managed a bowl of escargot and mushrooms, though I bitterly did not have room for the food vendor selling chocolate covered strawberries and cream puffs on a stick.

We left Gilroy in the sweltering late afternoon to return to our campsite in cool Mount Madonna County Park just 10 miles outside of town.  Situated in the South Coast Range, the 10 miles and elevation gain makes a world of temperature difference: 95 degrees in Gilroy compared to 65 degrees at Mount Madonna, and we were very grateful.  Though Mount Madonna has first-rate camping facilities (swanky showers!), the park is very family oriented, so we endured a lot of rowdy children and absolutely no enforcement of the 10 P.M. to 6 A.M. quiet hours.  However, the stands of Coastal Redwood trees were amazing and the morning fog from the Pacific made us feel like we were back in Big Sur.

Mount Madonna County Park campsite #123

We left the Coast Range on Sunday morning to cross the Central Valley and return to our home range in the Sierra Nevada.  Driving California highways, we go from Gilroy to Mariposa before the final ascent to Yosemite. But what's a visit to Gilroy without a stop at Casa de Fruta, the world's greatest fruit stand and tourist trap?! Where else could you find Donut Peaches and postcards showing migrant workers?  Fruit stand, restaurant, wine shop, campground, coffee shop - you name it, Casa de Fruta's got it.

In the Central Valley we are always on the lookout for taco trucks and Ramon's Tacos in the tiny agricultural town of Planada on the corner of Highway 140 and Plainsburg Road next to the El Campo store is one of our favorites.  The Al Pastor tacos are served with toppings that differ from other trucks: grilled onions, avocado slices and green salsa.  How could we possibly eat another meal on Garlic Festival Weekend?  With Ted, there's always room for tacos.

Junket Ratings:

Gilroy Garlic Festival: Junk in the Trunk!

Mount Madonna County Park Campground: Junk-O-Rama

Ramon's Taco Truck: Junk-O-Rama