Some festivals happen because a city needs them. Others because one guy walked into a bar in Louisiana, saw someone playing accordion with their whole body, and never recovered. And thankfully, the latter is how Gator by the Bay became San Diego’s largest Louisiana-themed festival. It returns to Spanish Landing park May 8 through 11.
On this week’s Happy Half Hour, co-founder Peter Oliver explains how a trip through Lafayette and New Orleans in the late ’80s turned into a lifelong obsession with Louisiana music, dance, and culture.
Its first version launched in 2001 with eight bands, a gospel tent, and about 2,000 people showing up more or less out of nowhere, Oliver shares. It also lost money. So they did it again. Then again. Somewhere along the way, the true believers stuck, they folded the blues community in, and the city got itself a waterfront party, Louisiana-style.
Today, it features more than 100 performances across seven stages, dance lessons, parades, a musical petting zoo, and 10,000 pounds of crawfish trucked in from Louisiana because, “California crawfish just don’t cut it.” If you’ve ever been elbow-deep at a proper boil—corn, sausage, steam, spice, mudbugs, and somebody telling you to suck the head—you already know this is not a cuisine that rewards restraint.
Also joining the episode is Derek Boykin of Beignet Belly, one of the festival’s vendors and proof that fried dough can absolutely become a life path. Boykin—originally from Oakland, CA, but whose family’s roots run through Baton Rouge—started tinkering with beignets after deciding he could make a better one himself. Now he and his wife Maria run the business as a pop-up, serving hot, powdered-sugar-covered pillows of joy at Oceanside Sunset Market and events around Southern California.
Finally, Panda Fest hits Waterfront Park April 25 and 26, the San Diego Zoo’s Food, Wine & Brew returns May 2, and Corbin’s Q has officially reemerged as Barlando in Rolando.
