Goat burgers, baklava sundaes, ouzo Jell-O shots return to the bayou for Greek Fest 2024 (2024)

When it comes to festival food, there are events where the names of restaurants taking part come close to the musical headliners for local recognition. This is New Orleans, after all.

But Greek Festival is different. The food here doesn’t come from vendors, but from a community. It's an expression of tradition and shared heritage that plays out through lamb roasting on spits, an emporium of handmade desserts, and some twists on tradition, to the tune of pomegranate daiquiris and ouzo Jell-O shots. Again, it’s New Orleans.

Greek Festival is held over Memorial Day weekend (May 24-26) along Bayou St. John on the grounds of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral and inside its Hellenic Cultural Center. Volunteers from the church and the larger local Greek community run the festival and prepare all the food.

“They do it with love; they have hands and hearts of gold,” said Alexandra Megilligan, part of the executive committee for the festival.

“It’s all handmade and it passes through their hands to yours,” she said.

It also passes through generations. With many of the key people running the festival food preparation now in their 80s, that’s an increasingly important dynamic for the event, now it its 49th year.

Greek food abounds

Roasted spring lambs are a centerpiece of the festival. Many of the volunteers on the lamb crew hail from small villages around Greece, where roasting a lamb in just this way is a major obsession, something akin to the way people in Louisiana pursue the crawfish boil.

Slow-cooked on the bone, marinated with olive oil, lemon, garlic and oregano, the meat comes off the spit juicy and bursting with flavor and it’s sold by the pound to eat at the event or bring home.

Around the festival grounds, there’s a music stage, dance floor, crafts tents and kids activities. But food is always close at hand.

Booths around the grounds dispense gyros, calamari, souvlaki and loukoumades, which are like Greek beignets topped with honey and cinnamon. Combination dinner plates give tastes of different Greek specialties, there are many vegetarian dishes and many people beeline for the baklava sundae, combining Greek tradition with ice cream fountain Americana.

One returning festival favorite is the goat burger, back after a hiatus through the pandemic years. The ground goat is cut with a bit of pork to boost its juiciness and dressed with tzatziki on a kaiser bun.

Sweets, Jell-O shots

The festival also transforms the Hellenic Cultural Center into a Greek food mart of sorts, with tables stocking everything from tubs of tzatziki and red caviar spread to salad dressing and flavored honeys. This is also where you’ll find the sprawling pastry operation, with different varieties of cakes, cookies and other sweets, all made by the local families who support Greek Festival.

It’s common to see people buy a box of pastries, tie it with string and put it aside to bring home before making a second round of the selection to pick out the treats they just have to eat right then and there.

This festival’s theme for 2024 is “celebrating a zest for life” and as such lemons are in play across the menu. One new dessert is a lemon lataifi ekmek, a lemon custard with shredded filo, layers of cream cheese and whipped cream and pecans.

Greek Festival is a family-oriented party, but it is a party that the local community throws itself into with gusto. Drink stands have beer, imported wines from Greece, daiquiris made with pomegranate (an ancient Greek symbol of prosperity) and lots of potent, anise-flavored ouzo. You can even try an ouzo Jell-O shot for an update on festival tradition.

This year there's an ouzo lemonade and a new co*cktail mixing lemonade and mastiha, a liqueur made with resin from mastic trees, which only grow on the island of Chios, which has sent many immigrants to New Orleans through the years (a whole circuit of local restaurants have been run by families from Chios).

Raise a mastiha co*cktail to toast them, say “opa" to anyone you meet around the grounds, and maybe Bayou St. John will feel just a little closer to the Aegean this weekend.

Greek Festival

1200 Robert E. Lee Blvd.

May 24, 5 p.m.-11 p.m.

May 25, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.

May 26, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.

Tickets $10, weekend pass $25