The event is will bring 7,000+ people to the Square Author: Shandel Menezes Updated: 10:27 PM CDT April 29, 2021
TYLER, Texas 7,000 attendees vendors are in for 12+ hours of music and more BBQ than they can eat at this year s annual Red Dirt BBQ and Music Festival. Tickets sold out within five minutes.
Carleen Dark, organizer for the festival said, “There won t be a bad seat in the house.”
Last year, Red Dirt was cancelled due to the pandemic but is back this year with extra safety precautions.
Dark said, We have rearranged the layout and redesigned where the concert goers can sit and stand. And we have much more space. We did that initially, for better social distancing.”
On March 8, 2020, a crowd converged on Four Corners Brewing Co. for a festival dedicated to Filipino food. Popular, rising-star pop-up businesses run by Filipino-American chefs with day jobs served more than a thousand customers that day. At 2 p.m., the wait for a bowl of noodles was 50 minutes, and another line was keeping people standing for an hour.
It felt like every food lover in Dallas was there. In one line, I chatted with
Texas Monthly taco editor José Ralat, and at the ice cream booth,
D Magazine dining critic Eve Hill-Agnus worked serving scoops.
None of us knew this would be the last time the Dallas food community partied together. Two days later, Dallas County reported its first known case of COVID-19. On March 17, the county’s dining rooms and bars closed by public order.
Poking through the steaming wreckage of 2020, it’s hard to find much good. But that’s what we’re going to attempt here: a list of good developments on the Dallas food scene that came from this horrible year.
Yes, given all the awfulness we have endured, it is easier to list bad and alarming trends. America’s politicians showed a total failure of imagination in their response to the pandemic, providing small businesses with help only in the form of a complicated, confusing loan program. They also, as of this writing, have sent American workers a single direct payment, with a second, even smaller payment on the way.