come back and buy a cone,” Rossini said. She wanted small cookies, similar to those she made at home. Served warm, they can be gobbled in one bite, and before you know it, you’ve eaten far more than you’d care to admit. Rossini and her business partners, Gary Olson and Neil and Brenda O’Leary, kept coming back after that first year. They kept their day jobs and pumped any profits back into the business. They added equipment and three years later bought a permanent site. Soon, Sweet Martha’s Cookie Jar became almost synonymous with the Minnesota State Fair. They bought a second, and more recently a third site, each strategically placed around the fairgrounds’ 322 acres. The third, on the north side of the fairgrounds, was added in part to lure people to that area. Each of those locations gets busy quick and remains busy, often drawing large crowds that clog the street. Sweet Martha’s employs up to 800 people for the fair, about 60% of whom return from previous years. They begin hiring as early as February. The three sites can now bake 44,000 cookies every 12 minutes, and on average make 1 million cookies a day. On busy days, the operation can churn out 3 million hot, fresh cookies. It now serves cookies in different sized cones, and also in half-gallon plastic buckets. Each one is filled as high as the cookies can be stacked, so users walk away balancing the cookie towers like precious cargo. It doesn’t always work. Within the fair’s first few days, the ground becomes pockmarked with round stains from cookies trampled under tens of thousands of feet. Rossini said she was never tempted by the opportunity to open a cookie shop outside the fair, recalling some of the challenges associated with the yogurt shop. And these days, Sweet Martha’s remains largely a Minnesota State Fair thing, though you can get its frozen cookie dough at grocers. “I knew, with the frozen yogurt shop, how much work that was,” she said. Rossini kept her day job, as an art teacher working with kids, until her retirement. Many of the fair’s food vendors work numerous events. Others, such as the pizza vendor Green Mill or French Meadow Bakery, have local restaurants. The Blue Barn, which sells items like blueberry basil lemonade, breakfast gnocchi and Chicken in a Waffle—a waffle cone filled with chicken tenders and gravy—is owned by the Blue Plate Restaurant Group, which operates several local restaurants. And some fair operators used to run restaurants. Jim O’Gara started his bar and grill in St. Paul in 1941. It would eventually become a local institution, known for its annual St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. The cartoonist Charles Schultz lived in one of the upstairs apartments with his father as a teenager. O’Gara sold the restaurant to his son, Tim, in 1972. Tim O’Gara sold it to his son Danny in 2004.
KRIS AND DANNY O’GARA. | PHOTO BY JONATHAN MAZE
By that point, however, O’Gara’s at the Fair got its start in a 17-by-17 booth in the fair’s “Food Building.” A popular Reuben Dog sold so well that they were able to pay off the debt to open that location. “We sold 27,000 units of that,” Danny O’Gara said. “Multiple times we came within 10 to 20 units of running out.” In 2010, they were given the opportunity to take over a permanent building on a prominent corner just inside the fair’s main entrance. O’Gara’s at the Fair is a fixture these days, one that fully embraces the fair’s desire for its booths to look good. The inside could well be an urban Irish pub, complete with a neon sign out front. A large wooden arch above the ordering counter inside features the phrase, “céad mile fáilte,” Celtic for a “hundred thousand welcomes,” a common posting on pubs in Ireland. Inside there are photos and mementos from the original restaurant, including the original sign, and plenty of bar seating. Outside there is a large patio with more bar seating, which surrounds much of the site, and another ordering counter. “I didn’t want it to feel like a state fair booth,” Danny O’Gara said. “I wanted it to feel like an Irish pub. That’s what it feels like when you’re inside.” The menu is more fair than Irish pub, though there is plenty of beer, including Guiness. There is also a mint Shamrock Slushie. The food offerings include burgers and a selection of small bites, like the Irish Tater Kegs, large, deep-fried tater tots made with corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and sour cream. The new item this year is the Pot of Gold Potato Dumplings, cheesy garlic mashed potatoes folded into dumplings, deep fried and served with Top the Tater. It is made in conjunction with the Saturday Dumpling Company. Coming up with an idea can be tricky. If an item proves popular, O’Gara’s will sell 2,500 of them a day or more. So, they have to ensure they can handle that kind of demand when they get an idea for a unique fair food. In this case they had to make sure they could deep fry 2,000 orders of dumplings. “For us, it’s kind-of a challenge,” Danny said. “We’ve had thousands of great ideas, and people have recommended thousands. The challenge is how do you implement it and execute it.” Preparing for this is more year-round than you think. They start planning within a couple of months of the end of the fair and are in “full swing” by January. In late May, they start checking the equipment, which has been sitting all winter, to “work the kinks out.” O’Gara’s is open for two summertime car shows, but for the most part it is a fair-only thing now. They admit they are fortunate. Not everybody does that kind of business. “It’s a big risk,” Danny said. “People think that everybody out here is just killing it. That’s not always the case. We’re lucky to have a great location. “But whether you’re working in a tiny booth on the corner, or you’re Sweet Martha’s, everybody works exactly as hard as everybody else. Everybody is grinding and working.”
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RESTAURANT BUSINESS OCTOBER 2025
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