Fiesta Fact

Eat, Drink and Be Merry

Source:A Century of Fiesta in San Antonio by Jack Maguire

San Antonio has mastered the art of making visitors feel uncommonly welcome. One of the ways in which it demonstrates this is during the twenty frenzied over four days when up to 100,000 people crowd into La Villita for what is the biggest - and many consider the best - single event of Fiesta.

It's called "A Night in Old San Antonio," and that's exactly what it was when it began on April 21, 1948. That first NIOSA, at which the only foods served were barbecue, beans, and coffee for the net profit of $2,586, has expanded into four succeeding"nights" when 16,000 volunteers serve a cornucopia of exotic ethnic dishes, music, and dance to the revelers. The event adds more than $250,000 annually to the coffers of the sponsoring San Antonio Conservation Society.

Food, drink, and a variety of entertainment were hard to come by at the first Battle of Flowers in 1891. Those who were hungry after the parade either sampled the wares of the Mexican chili queens around Main Plaza, went home to dinner, or dropped in at the Menger Hotel Colonial Room across from the Alamo and had a seven-course meal for $1.50. In either place, the meal likely would include dishes of German or Mexican origin, with perhaps a purely Texan dessert like pecan pie.

Not so at Fiesta today, as a recent visitor demonstrated. He took one look at some of the menus offered at dozens of different events, including NIOSA, and vowed to start on opening day to eat all of his meals on site until the annual festival closed. His only stipulation was that each menu had to feature at least one entrée with which he was not familiar. In ten days, he tried thirty bills of fare at as many food booths. He was pleased with his accomplishment until he discovered later that he missed at least 150 more, almost all offering dishes he had never tried.

Take Your Choice from 300 Viands
The amount and variety of food consumed at a single Fiesta is incredible. The one-day Oyster Bake at St. Mary's University requires 90,000 of the bivalves, not to mention the fried catfish, eggrolls, crepes, and onion rings. At Hermann's Happiness, there is Kuh Schtik and a variety of other German delicacies. The Israeli Festival features kosher dishes comparable to those available in the best hotels in Jerusalem. And so on through a lengthy cookbook of other comestibles designed to please virtually every ethnic taste imaginable.

It is estimated that there are more than 300 foods available at a given Fiesta. They represent the best recipes of the thirty-plus ethnic and cultural groups that settled and developed San Antonio and who are still coming from around the world to live there. The greatest variety is available only at NIOSA because it operates fifteen food areas, each devoted to a variety of ethnic specialties. The menus change each year because NIOSA planners now use computers to determine the dishes that have proved to be the most palate-pleasing.