A Royal Affair
You can smell it from the highway — a sure sign that Gilroy’s annual garlic festival is in full swing with master chefs and garlic royalty coming together to celebrate 40 years of the vampire-killing-veg.
The festival, teaming with cooks and queens, isn’t just about Gilroy’s cash crop. It’s a volunteer-run event, where all the proceeds go to charity. Since 1979, the festival’s first year, the event has raised over $11.5 million dollars for local charities.
“It’s the community coming together in the spirit of service,” said Patty Garcia Martinez, “the money goes right back into Gilroy organizations.”
Martinez became Gilroy’s Garlic Queen in 1992, after winning a pageant, a $5,000 scholarship and a trip to Gilroy’s sister city in Tokamachi, Japan along with it. For Martinez, however, becoming Queen was a way of giving back to her community.
When she was 17, an electrical short burned three rural Gilroy houses to the ground — one of them was hers. Martinez recalled how the city rallied to support her and her parents
after the family was left with nothing.
“The Red Cross put us up in a hotel,” she said, while “citizens
gave us clothing, pots and pans, blankets and businesses gave us gift certificates to get any-
thing from tooth brushes to shoes.”
Becoming a representative for Gilroy’s most prominent event and produce, was just one small way that Martinez thought she could return the favor for her city’s outpouring of community support.
She’s attended the Garlic festival every year since, and today she, along with three of her children, JC, Diego and Yasmin, were part of the 4,000 volunteers helping put the event together. Her daughter, Yasmin is 15, but already has her sights set on winning the Garlic Queen crown in three years, when she reaches the minimum age.
Over 100,000 people are expected to come through Gilroy’s garlic festival over the coming weekend — and when they walk through Gourmet Alley, the heart of the festival with garlicky eats like pasta con pesto, calamari, scampi and salted mushrooms, they’ll likely notice the massive bursts of flame emerging from a line-up of pans.
The masters of these pan-based pyrotechnics are the pyro-chefs, who cook scampi and calamari for the crowds trying to squeeze in a picture of the show.
“I’m in a lot of people’s vacation photos,” says Michael Clarke, a veteran pyro-chef who’s been returning to the festival for 17 years, “My kids have found me on YouTube before.”
His kids are the reason that Clarke returns every year to stand for hours in the heat. “All the money that would go to me is going to St. Mary’s school where my kids go,” he said.
Despite the long hours on your feet, it’s a tough gig to get. “You have to know someone to do this,” he said, as he looked down the line of returning pyrochefs, many of them former co-workers, or well-known community members. By day, they are probation officers, like Clarke, or construction workers or teachers. But when summer rolls around, the men turn into local celebrities, cooking up calamari for the masses.
The only woman helping cook next to the long line of men whose arm hair has been partially singed off was dressed in a kimono and crown. Few may have known that the bedazzled cook shaking her hips and handling the hot pan over the massive flame was actually Gilroy’s Garlic Queen for 2018. Mayako Yamashita, 18, won a contest in Tokamachi, Japan to serve as a royal ambassador in her sister city of Gilroy.
Tokamachi asked Gilroy to become a sister city 30 years ago, when Takkomachi began hosting its own garlic and beef festival in September. This year is particularly special, marking not only the 40th Gilroy garlic festival, but also the 30th festival in Takkomachi.“I’m so happy because this year is double anniversary,” Yamashita said.
2018’s Garlic Queen was also in attendance at Gilroy’s first-ever kids cook off. She watched on as young garlic lovers from ages 6 to 15 cooked up everything from garlic Mac N Cheese to garlic waffles.
Stirring away at her stove, 6-year-old Addyson Dell, a contestant in the cook-off, told the audience, “I want to be a chef and a princess.”
She needn’t worry — over the years to come, the Gilroy Garlic festival will be needing plenty of both.