Fun with Festival Food Addendum–Renfair
ByLast weekend on short notice I decided to go to one more festival before the summer ends (and in Chicago, it is actually starting to seem cooler these days each morning and evening). I know, everyone else was at the big annual air and water show downtown, so I headed the other direction and went to the Bristol Renaissance Faire instead.
The Renaissance fair here runs from July 10 through Labor Day. It’s located right along the border between Illinois and Wisconsin, and it sprawls over a seemingly endless stretch of ground with more shops than you can count. Like many festivals, it’s a huge money sink. You’ve got to bring lots of money to pay for games and rides and the million types of merchandise they sell here (soap! Jewelry! Swords! Bellydancing gear! Costumes! Leather gauntlets with claws coming out of them! Pirate scarves! Souvenir t-shirts! You get the picture). But it is a lot of fun to watch the jousts, and to give fruit to the flower fairy, and ride an elephant. Our family’s favorite activities here include Vegetable Justice, in which you throw fruit (yes, tomatoes are a fruit, people!) at a guy who continues to taunt you a second time; the pirate ship, where the $5 it costs for my son to clamber aboard is totally worth it because he stays there for a half hour at a time; and the selection of festival food, which is surely more diverse than it actually was during Renaissance times in Europe. I should add here that I’m the only one in my family for which this is a favorite. My husband, a vegetarian with a sensitive stomach, tries not to eat anything at all and forgets every year that there are actual restrooms on site. My kid just wants whatever’s fried, plus lemonade. Sigh.
When I was growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, I attended the Bonner Springs Renaissance fair every year. From those times I consider giant turkey legs to be the traditional food of any Renaissance fair, but I have never actually eaten one at the Bristol one. There are just too many other food selections to choose from. These days the one item I have to have is sassafras, which is basically root beer with a stronger licorice flavor. It costs $1 for a small cup, and I usually get at least two or three of these during the day. Sometimes I forget that I need actual water also and get dehydrated–better watch that next year!
I always have a hard time figuring out what I want to eat, and usually the main factor ends up being convenience, as in, whatever food stand I remember the location of when I finally get hungry. The past couple of years I’ve chosen the butterfly potatoes stand, where they also serve fried mac and cheese for my son and the next-door vendors offer corn on the cob and mushrooms sauteed in garlic. Yum. Every year I also determine I’m going to finally try some beef jerky and get a pickle, but I never do because the stands aren’t anywhere near where we’re going. We did get some dark chocolate gelato for dessert.
Seriously, the food offerings are pretty great. Shepherd’s pie, Cornish pasties, Italian beef, root beer floats, Polish sausage, artichokes (ooh, maybe I’ll try those next time), sundaes, shishkabobs, hummus, pretzel dogs, smoothies, slushies, even portobello burgers are available here. The Renfair even has a nice selection of cocktails and beer. I will go so far as to say that I come here at least in part for the food–my weakness for festival food rears its ugly head again. Fortunately for my diet, the summer’s almost over and I’ll just have to make do with regular fast food until after winter’s over.
Better get on that elliptical again.
Bristol Renaissance Faire
Off I-94 at the IL/WI Border (exit at Russell)
(847) 395-7773
Weekends only through 9/6
www.renfair.com/bristol
