Outrageous Fair Food is always a mouthwatering highlight of a fair visit. What crazy edible will they next put on a stick? One of the all-star, Fair Food personalities is the well-traveled Midway Gourmet, Chef Dominic Palmieri of Biggy’s fame on the RCS Carnival Midway. We’ll find out what indulgent deliciousness Chef Dominic is cooking up now for The OC Fair (“Always a Good Time”) running through Sunday, August 18th. We’re again taking Fair Food at its tastiest best with The Midway Gourmet.
On Chef Dominic’s menus are Peaches and Cream Funnel Cake, Nashville Hot Chicken Tots and Honey Sriracha Bacon Wrapped Pork Belly on a Stick.. Yum …!
This is Anne-Marie Panerinkin, Culture OC's food columnist. You can follow me online at CultureOC.org. When I want the best in food and dining news outside of Orange County, of course, I tune in to the SoCal Restaurant Show on AM830KLAA. And welcome back. It is the SoCal Restaurant Show, and we're here with you every Saturday morning from 10 AM until 12 noon right here on AM830KLAA, the home of Angels Baseball 2024, and you can also catch us on the AM830KLAA Angels app. I'm Andy Harris, the executive producer and co-host of the show, and we're presented each and every week by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Primeates. We're journeying back to the Orange County Fair, which opened yesterday for their run. The theme this year and running through August 18th is always a good time. And of course, we need to talk about fair food and who better to represent what's going on at the OC Fair than Dominic Palmeri, the Midway Gourmet, as Dominic was just telling us in the last segment. This is his 31st Orange County Fair, and he doesn't look that old. Dominic, welcome back. You were just talking about the $5 taste. I know you've done something else with honey and sriracha this year. Why don't you tell us about that, if you will? Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about the sweets now, right? We talked about meats and treats, now we're talking about the sweets. So with the honey and sriracha, you can actually get that on ice cream. Honey sriracha and vanilla ice cream is so delicious. It completely changes. You know, I love when somebody puts it in their mouth and I watch their eyes kind of roll up and you can see the expression on their face. That is what you get when you try some of the items that we always work so hard to bring here to the OC Fair. The RCS Carnival Midway is pushing that envelope. I love this honey sriracha, but when I say that, this is actually honeycomb that's hydrated and ground up like a spice, so it's like a powder and it's a coarse powder. And then, of course, it's mixed with three different kinds of chilies. So it gives it the kick. I'm going to say that it's super, super delicious. And it's brand new, and I think you're going to start to see a lot of that in coming into the culinary world over the next two years. I think it's going to grab some legs and you're going to see that one, especially here local in Orange County, but can we talk about some of the other sweets? You bet, but before we move on, what is the base ice cream? Is it vanilla? It's vanilla. I love it with vanilla. It comes with vanilla. No, no, because, you know, you're getting the strong flavors with the honey and the sriracha, so you kind of want that neutral ice cream base, but I just wanted to be sure. Yes, Dominic, tempt us with some more sweets. Okay, I'm going to throw a total curve at you with your sweet tooth, because I just have to say, because this is some of the best that we've had in over a decade. I know this is going to sound crazy. The corn. The corn is so sweet that I had to include it with the sweets this year. When I mean sweet, I mean juicy, delicious, super sweet. It's remarkable. And you can get all kinds of roasted corn, street corn with tahine and mayo and cilantro and Cheetos and cheese, coffee, name it, all kinds of stuff like that. Although drinks are good. We talked about the twist of lemonade. We've got dirty sodas this year are super popular on the Arceus carnival midway, but I'm really loving, you know, I'm going to say that the Oreos, which I kind of refer to as the truffle of the carnival. Okay. I mean, you are the midway gourmet Dominic. So go for it. I don't know what it was. I had one last night and I don't know what it was. It just brought the kid out in me. I'm like, Oh my God, you know, this has been, we've been doing deep part Oreos now for over 20 years. And it just was so good a remarkable. I just had to bring that one up. And of course, when we talked about the Oreos, those are what we would call now more of the traditional sweets at the fair, right? Because people have been doing it for so many years, really, of course, candy, the caramel and candy apples. But we talked about the sodas and then, of course, funnel cake. Yes. I love funnel cakes. You know, there's, I don't know what it is. There's something about just eating a funnel cake in the evening that just changes everything about what you do when you're at the fair. And the peaches and cream funnel cake has been super popular this year. And I want you to think of ice cold wedges of peaches on top of a piping hot funnel cake with fresh ice cold whipped cream. And when the peaches go on top, it has some of that nice syrup and then cinnamon and sugar. It's like peach pie and whipped cream wrapped up in a funnel cake. I just, I love that one. And then the new one, of course, that we just debuted the first time ever, the world debut, the cheesecake bite funnel cake. And I'm just going to say that we have these amazing little half-inch squares of cheesecake bites that go on top of a funnel cake. And you can get chocolate or you can get raspberry sauce. There's so many different ways to do it. And you can create your own funnel cake fantasy. It's kind of like a funnel cake bar, right? It's like going, I said, like, you got this like a big gourmet of all these different items. You can create your funnel cake fantasy. These are the things that are just so much fun when you come to the fair. But one of my most favorite this year, one of the freshest and one of the best ones that reminds me of summer, is the candied watermelon. I want you to think of a massive wedge, a giant triangular shaped wedge of watermelon on a huge 14-inch stick. It's wrapped in a sour fruit roll-up. It's got like three feet of sour fruit roll-up, because the piece of watermelon is so big, and then we drizzle it with a liquid chamois, then we hit it with some of the pieces. Sweet, juicy, sour, spicy. Everything that you can think of that just reminds you of the start of summer and the O.C. fair. Those are just some of the things that just make my job so much fun. And I got to tell you, you just got to come and try one of the probably 50 items that I mentioned, just one, and hopefully will change your life when it comes to gourmet fair food. Well, we want our listeners to know, Dominic, that during the fair on the RCS Carnival Midway, you are very visible, and you're usually wearing a red chef's coat, so kind of hard to miss. And you do love to engage with your fair growers, as I'm sure our listeners appreciate. You're not a shy guy, and that's a good thing if you're going to be on the Carnival Midway. So I do encourage you when you're at the fair and walking around, look for Dominic because he's a lot of fun. Now, Dominic, before we run out of time, we do know that you are of Italian heritage, and you are doing things on the Carnival Midway with pizza way before we got the current explosion of artisan and gourmet pizza, and it's amazing. I mean, it continues to expand and endure, but just share with our listeners, if you will, the base of your pizza, and probably one of your new creations this year because you always have your old standards, but then you're always doing something new every year. So we know you're proud of pizza, and we don't want to miss it. Yeah, no, pizza is just... I love that. You know, we love keeping it as artisan as possible, by the way. You know, I was in Naples several weeks ago. I got an invite to go down there and go actually go visit with some of the great pizza. YOLO is just seeing what they're doing. Of course, that pizza is a totally different kind of pizza, but the passion is really what I wanted to see, and I hope that that shows and the passion that I have for pizza as well. We do more of a traditional New York style pizza. You know, I walked in the stand yesterday, and I have three great pizza YOLOs working inside there, and I said to the boys, I walked in and said, "You know, I've never been in a pizzeria that when you walk in that the dough smells so good." And it's true. It really starts with the dough. If you don't have a great dough, you just don't have a great pizza. All the other ingredients, of course, are the best that we can put on it. We're doing all kinds of things with different types of meats and cheeses, but you know, I love the hot Cheeto Cheese pickle pizza. Last night, we couldn't put enough pickles on pizza. They were just flying out the way it's become super popular. We love doing that. When you see what we're doing and how we do it and we're hand tossing in the bake that comes off in the pizza, really is remarkable. You know, we're doing this honey -- hot honey -- Sriracha pizza as well that we're doing this year. We also, by the way, from the pizza, any -- when you come to the fair and you're going to go see a concert or you just want to go sit down and just relax, we've got a beautiful charcuterie board. It's got chocolate-covered cranberries and it's got olives and it's got two kinds of spicy, sliced meats and it's got cheeses and crackers and the whole thing, you can get a charcuterie board. And I love if you want to see me at night, you see me over to Enzo's kind of holding court. We just opened up a brand new coffee espresso bar. Listen, this isn't the fruit-free stuff with all the two pumps of stick or doodle and Oreo cookie and vanilla stuff. You come and get a traditional and great Italian coffee, a great espresso, a great latte or a cappuccino. And we've got the cannoli bar that we're doing. You've got all different ways to make the cannolis. You'll see me usually there. I kind of hold court at night and visit with the customers. A lot of the Fairbenders come over. Great place to kind of end the night, grab a coffee, grab a six-pack. We've got a beautiful box, a beautiful pastry box for a six-pack of cannolis to go. And you can walk out and take something home with you. Right next door to us are the totally baked cookies. You can get a bucket of cookies, take a bucket of cotton candy, just take a bucket of something on your way out and share it with all your friends and family that couldn't make it out to the fair. And a great tease. I mean, Dominic, I love it. Now, for our listeners that might be familiar, what are the days and hours of the fair and what is the closing date? Because we don't want them to go on one of those dark days, Dominic. Yeah, we're closed Mondays and Tuesdays. So the fair is open Wednesday through Sunday. We open at 11 a.m. every day. We close around midnight at night. And, you know, we go all the way into the third week of August. I believe it's Sunday, the 18th. I'm not looking at Calibri, I believe it's the outside. You are right, Dominic. I can say that because I have it in front of me. Otherwise, I wouldn't dare. Yep. And so, but the concert lineup this year is amazing. And even the tribute concert shows are great. But the commercial exhibits, the animals, the farm, the education that you get. Oh, the Southern California, forgive me. I don't know the exact name, but there is one of the most beautiful displays of all the Southern California beach areas that's here at the fair that you just have to come experience some of the iconic things from Balboa and Manhattan Beach. And we're down to all the things that Southern California beach life is here at the fair for you to see. When you come, you're just going to, it just takes you back in time and it just lets you get out of the rat race of what we do every day right in our normal life to just come to the fair and have a great day with your family. And hopefully we'll see you at least two or three times. Dominic, I love it. As we need to say goodbye, we also want all the listeners know that in the OC Pavilion are the culinary demonstrations, the schedule of what goes on there is online. But there is fruit carving and their culinary demonstrations and a lot going on. So you don't want to miss the OC Pavilion at the Orange County Fair either. Ladies and gentlemen, it is the Midway Gourmet himself, Dominic Palmeri. You can see him on the RCS Carnival Midway at the OC Fair, always a good time now through August 18th. You are listening to the SoCal restaurant show. When we return, we are going to Las Vegas and we are going to be talking about one of the James Beard Foundations six awarded this year of an America's Classic. You'll want to hear this. It is quite a story. It is the SoCal restaurant show. We're proudly presented by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Prime Meats. We'll be right back. right back. [MUSIC PLAYING]
