Special Event

Main Street in SoMa will be filled for Arkansas Cornbread Festival

Melanie Keen (right) squirts maple syrup on a cornbread sample  for Kelley Cooper at the 2017 Arkansas Cornbread Festival. This year’s festival on Saturday will feature not only a wide range of cornbreads, but also music, art and family fun.
Melanie Keen (right) squirts maple syrup on a cornbread sample for Kelley Cooper at the 2017 Arkansas Cornbread Festival. This year’s festival on Saturday will feature not only a wide range of cornbreads, but also music, art and family fun.

It's an eternal cornmeal-based battle: Should cornbread be sweet or savory?

At the Arkansas Cornbread Festival on Saturday, it's not either/or. It's both.

Festival chairman Lori Ducey says the entries can range from breads with sausage to super-sweet like one winner's blueberry cornbread with maple buttercream: "It can be really elevated and different to traditional skillet cornbread with beans."

This is the eighth year for the festival, which Ducey describes as a celebration of Southern culture through food, art and music.

But it's also "a community development event. It's about supporting the small businesses that are in the SoMa community. It was kind of neglected for a while. It has this resurgence that's been going on for a number of years.

"The Cornbread Festival was created to bring people back to the community so they could see what was going on in this area."

So, the SoMa restaurants and businesses will be open for the masses.

There will also be food trucks, local vendors, nonprofit organizations and artists selling their wares and sharing information about their services.

Music is part of the fun. John Burnette and Ten Penny Gypsy will supply tunes in the Bernice Garden while Brick Field, Charles Woods and the Element and Bonnie Montgomery will entertain on the event's main stage.

This year, they're adding a little more family fun. The 17th Street block will host a number of area organizations such as Heifer International, Girl Scouts, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center and the Historic Arkansas Museum who will provide interactive activities for children.

The highlight of the festival will be the cornbread, baked up by 15 different entrants divided into amateur and professional categories.

While admission is free, those who want, as Ducey says, "to fully enjoy all the funness of the festival," must buy tasting tickets. They're $8 in advance, $10 at the festival.

Arkansas Cornbread Festival

11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, Main Street between 13th and 17th streets, Little Rock

Free admission

Tasting tickets: advance $8, at the gate $10

arkansascornbreadfe…

Ticket holders can then make their way around the festival sampling the breads and sides and casting their votes for their favorites. Cash prizes go to the top two winners in the amateur and professional categories. And because cornbread would be lonely without side dishes, there will also be awards for those.

There will also be blue ribbons presented by guest celebrity judges including Matt McClure of The Hive in Bentonville and Capi Peck of Trio's. While in the past, those awards have been determined behind the scenes, this year they're making it more public.

"We'll set up an area around the Root Cafe," Ducey says. "Foodies will want to hear how they're judging. It will be fun to see how the judges are picking the blue-ribbon winners."

To juggle all the samples of cornbread, Ducey recommends taking a muffin tin with you.

She also recommends planning ahead for parking. And people should feel free to take their fur babies. The event is pet-friendly, and they'll have a "watering hole" set up for pups.

According to Ducey, Expedia and P. Allen Smith have highlighted the festival as a top attraction for the fall and organizers hope everyone will come out, eat up and check out the revitalization of SoMa.

"It's a fun place to live," Ducey says. "Come down here, get something to eat, find interesting shopping. It's a fun place."

Weekend on 10/25/2018

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