Garlic Festival’s opening day pleases event-goers with garlicky
dishes, flame-ups and entertainment galore
Gilroy – They came. They shopped. They ate. And then they ate and shopped some more. Thousands of visitors spilled into Christmas Hill Park on Friday for the first day of the 28th
annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, and a great deal of them arrived with a single-minded agenda.
“I just came to eat,” said Dimetrius Jones, a Richmond resident who arrived at the festival at 2pm. By 2:15pm, he had polished off a combo platter of pasta, mushrooms, pepper steak and scampi.
“I starve myself in the morning so I can eat,” Jones explained. “I’m gonna try three or four more plates today. Hey, it’s once a year.”
Pam Thrasher was walking out of the Garlic Mercantile tent at 10:30am with an armload of Herbie’s, the garlic-bulb-headed bobble doll that has been the hottest selling item for four years running. Thrasher bought one bobblehead doll for herself and four more for her kids.
“I have at least one of them from each festival,” she said. “Herbie is the bomb. The stink bomb.”
Before the gates opened to visitors at 10am, organizers held the ceremonial lighting of the first flame at Gourmet Alley, the festival’s main food artery where 1,000 volunteers work in an assembly-line operation to churn out several tons of food each day.
A torch lit from a large flaming garlic bulb was passed from festival organizers to city leaders to foreign emissaries from Gilroy’s Sister Cities, until it landed in the hands of Val Filice, the “Godfather of Gourmet Alley” who masterminded the recipes that have drawn millions of hungry visitors over three decades.
That flame is one of about a half dozen used throughout the weekend for the alley’s “flame-up” stations, where pyrotechnic chefs saute calamari and shrimp under 5-foot high flames.
Early risers on the East Coast got a taste of the flame-ups before their West Coast counterparts, thanks to a 5:30am demonstration in front of news cameras by Ken Fry, co-chair of the committee that organizes Gourmet Alley.
“That’s the big draw for Gourmet Alley – the flames,” Fry said. “When you have fire and the mystique of garlic, people just congregate.”
Gourmet Alley wasn’t the only hot spot Friday. About 200 visitors gathered in the Garlic Idol tent to watch aspiring singers belt out songs by Christina Aguilera, Enrique Iglesias and other superstars. Two dozen contestants turned out for a last ditch chance to make the final cut for the competition modeled on the hit television series “American Idol.” Many had narrowly missed the cut during several weeks of competition on Mix 106.5.
“My old roommate told me, ‘Go to the Garlic Idol,'” said Kimmy Barnes, a 22-year-old San Jose resident who said her voice was going hoarse. “If I’m going to sing I’m going to sing to win. But I want to have a good time.”
For local charities, the best part of the festival is the hundreds of thousands of dollars it raises each year. Volunteers labor in the sun for three days and direct their hourly “wages” toward a charity of their choosing. Over 27 years, the festival has raised more than $7 million in charity dollars.
Gilroy High School choir director Phil Robb was volunteering at the festival for his 19th year. His charity earnings will once again be directed to the kids in the choir. From inside the Gourmet Alley tent, he couldn’t precisely gauge festival turnout.
“It looks like a good Friday,” said Robb, who was helping prepare the calamari. “But I can only judge by how much seafood goes out.”
Micki Pirozzoli, the president of the 2006 festival, said it was too early to say how big the turnout was, but said it compared well with the Friday from last year’s event. Last year, the festival drew nearly 130,000 visitors.
During an opening ceremony at the Garlic Cook-Off stage, Pirozzoli welcomed the crowd with a bit of trivia tailored for visitors from a certain Midwest city.
“In Gary, Indiana,” she said, “it’s illegal to go to a movie or ride public transportation within four hours of eating garlic. So don’t go home too soon.”
At the end of the festival’s first day, Pirozzoli had one more piece of trivia to share: In Marianne, Oregon, a minister can’t perform a service within an hour of eating garlic.
“We would be quarantined for a month here in Gilroy,” she said.
