Traditional Middle Eastern performances from the 2015 St. George Middle Eastern Food Festival entertain guests. Photo courtesy of John ManosTamara Imam - Managing Editormanaging@insideuab.com
For the 35th year in a row, the Saint George Middle Eastern Food Festival is using food as the main agent for cultural appreciation and understanding.
The festival, hosted by St. George Melkite Greek-Catholic Church, will take place from Thursday, Sept. 8 to Saturday, Sept. 10 at the church on 16th Avenue South. The hours of operation are 10:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. each day.
Members of the parish, mother and son duo Annette and Jeremy Ritchey, are leading this year’s festival as first-year chairmen. The chairmen hope that the festival will continue to bring the Magic City together to celebrate Middle Eastern culture through food and dance.
To Annette Ritchey, the festival is all about “providing our Arabic, our Middle Eastern hospitality to Birmingham.”
The festival boasts somewhere from 8,000 to 10,000 attendees each year, with people sometimes coming from out of state to enjoy the food, music and various vendors. While lines can become long throughout the weekend, Jeremy Ritchey says for festival-goers not to be discouraged.
“We are watching lines. We do adjust what we’re doing,” he said.
In addition to serving people inside, the church also runs a drive-thru and delivery service the weekend of the festival.
“Sometimes we run 30, 40, 100 orders a day to people’s businesses,” Jeremy Ritchey said. “That’s one of the ways we can grow as a parish- if you can’t come to us we’ll come to you. We’ll go the distance to deliver to you.”
According to the Ritchey’s, planning for the festival has been months in the making, with weekly cooking days on Saturdays — sometimes with over 100 members of the parish preparing, beginning in June.
The festival will feature a number of homemade Middle Eastern dishes, from baked kibbee, stuffed grape leaves, Mediterranean style chicken, falafel, meat pies and spinach pies.
Jeremy Ritchey’s favorite? The Oasis plate. The $18 plate includes one half-baked chicken, three rolled grape leaves, rice, green beans, Arabic salad, bread and choice of spinach or meat pie.
In addition to providing food, the Ritchey’s also hope that the festival will give people in the Birmingham community an opportunity to interact with Middle Eastern culture, which Jeremy Ritchey believes has been painted in a negative light by the media post-9/11.
“At the end of the day it’s an opportunity to get people there through food, which happens to be the center point of a lot of our culture and if that’s ultimately something that gets people upstairs then we feel like we’re doing our job,” Jeremy Ritchey said. “One of the biggest things I think that is important, you know I used to work overseas and I never saw the bad side of what we see on our media today. I worked overseas for a few years and I never crossed it, whether it was through Muslims or Christians, I never found that side that you see today all the time through the media. What we want to show is that same side, to show that there are Middle Eastern people that are good, because if you just saw the media you wouldn’t know that so much. And that’s something that our church can show through our culture as well as through our religion and show that there’s peace as well. I think that’s huge, today, post 9/11 that we can say ‘hey, listen we’re still out here as well and come and see us.’”
The Ritchey’s said that the church considered changing the name of the festival after 9/11 but decided against it.
“When you change a name, you rebrand yourself,” Annette Ritchey said. “But you know what? We’re Middle Eastern. And we’re proud of it.”
A large percentage of the proceeds from the festival go to parish’s charity projects, which include funding for Pathways, Three Hots and a Cot and the Nest. This year, the parish will also support refugees from across the Middle East and victims of the floods in Louisiana.
“The festival as a whole indirectly helps feed a lot of people in the community, which then brings a lot of parishes in the community together at our church to be able to do it,” Jeremy Ritchey said.
A final note about the festival?
“Come join us,” Annette Ritchey said. “Come once, and you will come again.”
