Loading ...31st Lebanese Food Festival draws big crowd
Molly Powell, 5, and brother Zachary, 4, aren’t really into Lebanese food.
That was all right with the adults accompanying them Sunday on the last day of the annual Lebanese Food Festival in Glen Allen.
“We get to eat everything that they don’t,” said their dad, Jody Powell of Henrico County.
Molly and Zachary are more fond of chicken tenders and, for some reason, bran flakes. But for about 20,000 other people who attended the three-day festival, the event was all about shish kababs, various small pies, stuffed grape leaves, stuffed squash and stuffed people.
“We’ve got enough pies to reach Short Pump and back,” said Sandra Joseph Brown, a festival volunteer.
At least, that was the case before hungry hordes descended on the the hand-sized, triangular pies, the ingredients of which included meat, cheese and spinach.
The festival was the 31st at St. Anthony’s Maronite Catholic Church.
“This is a way for our parish to promote Lebanese traditions and culture and share them with the Richmond community,” Brown said. “We treat our guests as if they were people in our house.”
The festival is strictly an inside job, with the church’s 250 families doing the cooking, dancing, music playing, trash dumping and dish washing.
“We make everything, including the signs,” Brown said while giving a visitor a tour of the festival.
Ava Nadder, 8, wearing a peasant-type costume, was among those performing traditional dances. Her mother, Crystal Nadder, danced at the festival when she was a child.
Ava said, “I like it that we get to dance, and that they used to do that a long time ago, and that I get to dance with my family and friends, and I think that’s it.”
On the church’s 15 acres, there were trees and tents to lounge under, and for children, a playground and basketball court.
But the big attraction was the food.
Jennifer Brigle, a Henrico nurse, said she liked it because it was “authentic.”
“It’s not something you could go through a drive-through and order,” Brigle said.
Brigle and friend Carrie Bilek of Henrico shared various foods including bubbaghanooge, a baked-eggplant dish. They liked the spinach-and-cheese pie so much they got one apiece.
Source: www.richmond.com