365 Natural Italian Sodas Credit: Photo By John Anderson

MM Pack’s 10 Best Austin Food Events

1) The Saveur Texas Hill Country Wine & Food Festival is the third-largest food and wine festival in the U.S. Held every April in Austin, it is a four-day gastronomic blowout, with a focus on the local bounty of Central Texas. 2005 will be its 20th year.

2) The Green Corn Project, whose mission is to educate and assist Central Texans in growing organic home food gardens, holds a fundraiser every October at Boggy Creek Farm. The celebration embodies the Project’s motto, “Cook globally, grow locally,” with cooking demos by local chefs and terrific tastes prepared by premier Austin restaurants and caterers.

3) The Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival has been the premier pepperfest in Central Texas for 14 years. Appropriately held in blistering August in Waterloo Park, it’s an opportunity to hear local music, swill cold beer, and taste entries from very serious sauce makers, both commercial and amateur.

Panisse With Smoked Salmon, Capers, and Anchovy Mayonnaise at Cafe Caprice Credit: Photo By John Anderson

4) Spamarama, the biggest potted-pork party on the planet, is sponsored each spring by News 8 Austin in Waterloo Park. Where else can you enjoy green eggs and Spam, fried Spam, and Spam queso and chips? And don’t forget the Spamalympics and Spam sculpture contest.

5) Thai Cultural Day, sponsored by the Thai Association of Central Texas, is held every spring at Fiesta Gardens. It opens with a Buddhist ceremony and features terrific vendor food, cooking and vegetable carving demos, Thai music, and dancing.

6) Each March, a signature piece of the Star of Texas Fair & Rodeo is the Cowboy Breakfast at Auditorium Shores. Beginning at 6am, they serve up cowboy coffee, sausage, doughnuts, pigs in a blanket, steak sandwiches, breakfast tacos, hot pancakes, flaky biscuits, and groovy gravy. Also, the newly annual Chuckwagon Cookoff features old-style trail wagons authentically restored or replicated, right down to the cookbox and dutch ovens. As part of the competition, wagon owners prepare trail food over open fires all day and serve up the delicious results to the hungry hordes.

7) The Philippine-Pacific Island Festival and Friendship Day, sponsored by the Austin Filipino-American Association, takes place in October at Fiesta Gardens. Free to the public, it showcases Philippine and Polynesian foods, music, dances, and crafts. Get your lumpia here, folks.

8) For the past seven Februarys, Project Transitions has held the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? fundraiser. Volunteers host elaborately themed dinner parties around the city, ending with everyone converging for a champagne and dessert gala.

9) Each April, the Austin Museum of Art hosts La Dolce Vita on the grounds of Laguna Gloria, a hedonistic, gastronomic fundraiser with fabu food provided by Austin chefs and restaurants. Wine flows under the stars and twinkling lights, and Austin shows off its party clothes.

10) St. Elias Orthodox Church has hosted the Austin Mediterranean Festival for an amazing 72 years. Held each October on the church grounds near the Capitol, the two-day event features locally handmade Greek food and appetizers from around the Mediterranean. It’s all accompanied by appropriate music and the requisite belly-dancing. Opa!

This article appears in 2004.

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Mick Vann is a retired Austin chef who is a food writer and restaurant critic, cookbook author, restaurant consultant, and recipe developer. He moonlights as a University of Texas horticulturist with a propensity for ethnic eats and international food, particularly of the Asian persuasion, but he also knows his way around a plate of soul food or barbecue.

Mexico City native Claudia Alarcón has made Austin home since 1984. She worked her way through college in the local restaurant industry, graduating from the University of Texas in 1999. She has been a Chronicle contributor for 15 years and presents lectures and workshops on topics related to the foodways of Mexico, both locally and internationally.

Wes Marshall is the author of What's a Wine Lover To Do? (Artisan) and The Wine Roads of Texas (Maverick), as well as the Executive Producer of the PBS television series of the same name. Wes has written for The Austin Chronicle since 1999, covering wine, cocktails, food, and travel.

MM Pack is a food writer/historian and private chef who divides her time between Austin and San Francisco. A regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Edible Austin, she’s been published in Gastronomica, The San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Nation’s Restaurant News, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, The Dictionary of Culinary Biography, and Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation 1.

Rachel Feit is an archaeologist by trade who worked her way through college in kitchens in Chicago and Austin before discovering that dishing up words was more satisfying that dishing up meals. She has been writing about food and restaurants for The Austin Chronicle for more than a decade, but still loves to cook.