MIKE HENDERSON | PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE HENDERSON
For the 280 food vendors at the fair, which sell some 1,600 different items, those 12 days can be big business. Its top vendors can make $1 million or more. The biggest and most successful, Sweet Martha’s Cookie Jar, does nearly $5 million. In 12 days. Or about as much as an In-N-Out restaurant does in one year. Danny and Kris O’Gara made enough in those 12 days at their permanent booth, O’Gara’s at the Fair, that they opted not to reopen their stand-alone restaurant in 2019 after it was temporarily closed to make way for a new development. “We wake up every morning thinking how we are this blessed to be at the fair,” Danny O’Gara said. Blessed might be a good way of putting it. “It’s tough to get in,” Danielle Dullinger, who manages food and beverage at the fair, said in an interview. The fair ends at the start of September. Vendors are invoiced at the end of the month. In November, it will invite them back. Most will return, and typically at the same location. By April, the fair will have an idea how many openings there are, which is typically around five to 10 every year. The fair fills that small number of openings from about 700 applications. So, vendors have about a 1% chance of getting in. And everybody has the same chance, whether they’ve been on file for 25 years or 25 days. “The common misconception is we have this waiting list,”
MARTHA ROSSINI | PHOTO COURTESY OF SWEET MARTHA’S COOKIE JAR
Dullinger said. The fair looks through all the applications and chooses vendors based on a variety of factors, like the location, the utilities at the specific site, as well as what’s offered nearby. The fair doesn’t want to put a cheese curd vendor next to another cheese curd vendor. There must be “geographic balance of product.” The fair wants the booths to look good. “We really want you to look pretty put together,”
14
RESTAURANT BUSINESS OCTOBER 2025
Powered by FlippingBook