(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Justin Long, an assistant manager at Dizzy Chicken on Congress Street, stands with a bowl of Brazilian Smoked Seafood Chowder. The restaurant has won twice, for Best Newcomer and Best Off Broadway.
The Discover Saratoga Chowderfest runs Saturday March 26 with restaurants serving steaming, 4-ounce bowls of the creamy soups from their dining rooms and sidewalks or from the ground floor event space at the City Center Parking garage in Saratoga Springs.
Seventy restaurants are offering traditional chowders and specialty concoctions. The event runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Five of those 70 will be serving in the garage’s event space on High Rock Avenue near the intersection with Lake Avenue. That space will have live music, the Saratoga Winery and, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., a face painter and balloon sculptor for the kids, event organizers say.
A handful of restaurant owners and managers interviewed welcomed the return of the single-day festival, which was canceled last year because of the pandemic.
It’s a great community event and a friendly rivalry, restaurants say.
This year, as last, Discover Saratoga added the “Chowder Tour,” a weeklong celebration.
[For more, visit the Discover Saratoga website here.]
Participating restaurants sold their chowders to-go by the pint and quart this week. Last year the weeklong tour was the only way to have a festival at all. This year, it allows people the choice to avoid the crowd on Saturday yet still get some "chowda'."
"It was a way for us to hold an event safely" without canceling the entire event last year, said MacKenzie Zarzycki the director of marketing for Discover Saratoga. "It kept people engaged in the chowder experience."
Restaurants interviewed reported mostly solid sales this week and thought it was a good option for people who still do not want to congregate in public.
“It’s a good thing to always get the word out, to get people to come in the door. It’s good for, I think, everybody,” said Justin Long the assistant manager at Dizzy Chicken on Congress Street, a winner of Chowderfest twice: for Best Newcomer in 2018 and Best Off Broadway in 2019.
He said their restaurant has sold about 15 gallons of their Brazilian-inspired chowder this week.
Mario Cardenas, owner of the West Ave Pizza and West Ave Chicken, is a first-timer to the event and said that chowder sales from his two restaurants have been OK.
“We’re not doing the traditional, we’re going a different route,” he said. His restaurant offers a ravioli chowder, a soup that has been successful in his restaurants already, and the Colonel’s Chowder which features a creamy chowder base and fried chicken, a nod to Colonel Harland Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame.
“It’s our tribute to an American icon,” he said, chuckling. “We’re excited about this one.”
Erika Schreifels, owner of The Brick on West Avenue, said: “We actually sold out two days in a row.
“Somebody came in for chowder at 7:30 at night yesterday,” she said on Thursday, “but I had nothing left to give them.”
That is roughly 48 pints a day before 7 p.m., she said. This is her first Chowderfest, though she said her former Clifton Park restaurant participated in other events.
Cardenas did have a frustration or two. He said the official website seems to focus too much on Broadway, the core of dining in the city, when others on the outskirts could use more promotion. A Facebook page dedicated to the festival is strong and highlights many restaurants.
Still, Cardenas' issue did not dampen his mood. He is looking forward to Saturday when he will be serving from the public garage event space.
“Saratoga is a pro-business city. Everybody is ‘in.’ Everybody works together,” he said. “It’s an all-year-round town.”
Executive Chef Fabrizio Bazzani of Chianti on Division Street said he was looking forward to the return of the one-day festival.
He said he thought the weeklong tour idea was well-intentioned, but maybe customers did not understand how it worked. People came in expecting the quick bowl that they will get on Saturday, and his restaurant is not set up that way.
“Honestly, we’re in it for the fun of being part of the community,” he said on Thursday, adding that he prefers just the one-day event and hopes the festival will return to that. Discover Saratoga tells FoothillsBusinessDaily.com that they will go back to traditional one-day event next year.
Bazzani added on Thursday that he is a team player in any case:
“I’ll go with whatever the decisions will be...I will be part of the group. We do it for the community. We do it for Saratoga.”
Winners in eight categories will be selected by an online voting system. The votes are weighed by the percentage of likes a restaurant gets out of their total number of 4-ounce samples served. The idea is that a smaller restaurant that sells fewer samples but gets many likes has just as great a chance to win as the better-known restaurant that simply sells more bowls, officials said.