New Orleans has a festival for everything, and one of the best is the National Fried Chicken Festival. Here's our on-the-ground report.
“You can see us at 3 p.m. at the Fried Chicken Festival tomorrow,” legendary trumpeter Kermit Ruffins said as he was wrapping up a Saturday night set at his bar,might be the most famous, but just in the rest of this year alone, the city has almost 20 more scheduled, everything from the Crescent City Blues & BBQ Festival to the 34th New Orleans Film Festival to the Bayou Bacchanal.
The festival started in 2016, and this year brought in an estimated 123,000 people across two days, from all around the country . The same went with the restaurants: almost all of them were independently owned, and while most of them were from NOLA, many came from across the South, and some even from the Pacific Northwest.
You could also eat well at the festival if you don’t eat chicken, or meat at all. There were plant-based offerings like country fried blue oyster mushrooms with vegan secret sauce and chicken-fried tofu, and lots of alternate options like hot dogs topped with crawfish etouffee, collard greens-and-mushroom grilled cheese with Creole mustard sauce, fried catfish, Mexican street corn and birria tacos, among many others.
As much as the chicken was the reason for the gathering, it felt like the food was just a good excuse to get together and have a huge party. Yes, there was tons of stuff to eat, and long lines of people waiting to get it. But the waiting turned out to be the best part. If you planned it right, you had a drink or a snack to wait with, and plenty of time to soak in the atmosphere.
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