Year after year, you can depend on the Three Rivers Arts Festival. When the tents go up, fierce storms blow in.
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The Three Rivers Arts Festival food booths stretch along Commonwealth Place at Point State Park. (John Beale, Post-Gazette)
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For three weeks, a fog of food odors and fry molecules hangs over the Point. The heat from the grills and the deep fryers shimmers. Colorful booths and smiling children, daubed with face paint, line the sidewalk, which is covered with fallen french fries, globs of ketchup and pigeons.
Everybody attends and most people eat.
What is offered changes little. Seiver's lemonade is as sugary as ever. The bucket of fried veggies is steaming and sinful, covered with cheese. The mini doughnuts are tiny, cute and brown. The heavy, sweet scent of them, mingling with the bewitchingly buttery fragrance of Kettle Korn, is a carnival contained in a whiff. This is the smell that makes you want to eat.
Last year's successful top-your-own-cheeseburger booth is back, though the condiments are tucked behind the counter this year. Corn dogs, pizza, popcorn, pretzels, candy apples and cotton candy are standard and available. Recent favorites have returned: fried rice, egg rolls, apple dumplings and sticky, tender chicken on a stick.
Once again, America's favorite sandwich cookie is deep-fried and sold three for $3, flouting the current controversy over a lawsuit filed against Kraft Foods in May by a San Francisco lawyer seeking to ban Oreos because they contain trans fats. Batter-dipped, dunked in hot oil, powdered with sugar and sauced with Hershey's syrup, the Oreo goes soft. The fatty round cookie tastes like a doughnut. Tuesday afternoon, in an attempt to turn people on to this strange treat, one fried Oreo was free with every funnel cake.
Chimichurra to shish kebab, this year's food booths reflect a variety of cultures. There are fewer beef choices, and one booth offers only vegetarian entrees. It's almost, but not quite, a healthy booth, selling salads, smoothies -- and funnel cake.
I looked everywhere: There are no curly fries this year, but straight, pale, soggy fries are offered at several booths. The traveling Krispy Kreme truck that was such a hit last year -- complete with visible product line and an air-conditioned store -- did not return to this year's festival, although you can still buy the doughnuts at a nearby booth.
New this year is the portabella mushroom sandwich ($6). Grilled portabella wedges, onions, peppers, feta and spring mix are squirted with balsamic vinegar and sandwiched in a Montecello's soft roll or wrapped in a tortilla. Eating it makes you feel more virtuous than you would if eating a hamburger, and it tastes good and juicy. As a salad, sans bread, it costs $5.
The seafood quesadilla ($8), also new to this year's festival, is decent-tasting, not fried, though greasy, and you may find yourself tasting it -- despite gentle ingredients -- in every burp for hours. Wrapped in a thick tortilla with plenty of onions, tomatoes, peppers, it's topped with tangy cucumber sauce. The plate looks a little goopy, with a sadly wilted side salad and the unctuous quesadilla juice oozing all over the plate, but the flavors were peppy.
If the thought of seafood in the hot sun makes you cringe, not to worry: the quesadillas, platters and fajitas are made with imitation crab and lobster and little, tiny shrimp. This booth wins for most decorative food spot: Its lively display of lemons, fake grapes and piled vegetables is fun. The booth also offers low-carb grilled mahi-mahi and shrimp scampi over spinach fettuccine.
The strongest entry is the shish kebab/Texas barbecue booth. Pulled pork barbecue is tender, sweet and onion-y. Big-kernelled, bright yellow corn on the cob is gummy. The combo platter of kebab, grape leaves, hummus and Greek salad is fresh and light for $7.
A separate booth offers only gyros and baklava. The chicken gyro is all white meat doused in zesty white sauce, peppers, onions, tomatoes and lettuce in a pita that doesn't fall apart.
The Italian sausage sandwich is sloppy and large, too big for its bun and too thick to get spicy sausage and toppings in one bite.
After watching an older gentleman skillfully shape and stamp the edges of small calzones, we tried a bubbly brown one, and it was tasty. Non-fans of ricotta will be pleased to know that the pepperoni calzone has none of it, only pepperoni, sauce, mozzarella and onions. Non-fans of peppers will be dismayed to learn that the cheese calzone contains peppers and onions.
Desserts are huge. The chocolate covered Rice Krispie treat, a favorite last year, manages to be cold, crisp and chocolate-y at once. Still, it's a rip-off at $4. Ditto for the chocolate covered marshmallows on a stick ($3), sprinkled with rainbow jimmies, which make for good gnawing, chewy from the cooler.
Hard apple dumpling is tough to tame with a plastic fork, but warm and cinnamonny. Top it -- and the colossal strawberry shortcake ($5), a pile of sugared berries and crumbly pound cake -- with the creamier-than-Dairy-Queen soft serve vanilla ice cream, and you can't help but feel like you're part of the festival.
Sarah Billingsley can be reached at sbillingsley@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1661.
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