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Festival International: When Playing Second Fiddle Is a Blessing
Posted April 26, 2012 in Festivals, Louisiana Travel
It’s an extremely busy time for festivals around south Louisiana. While Jazz Fest in New Orleans tends to suck most of the oxygen from the room due to its sheer size, rich history and general awesomeness, the Festival International de Louisiane two hours down the highway in Lafayette is an increasingly appealing draw as well.
The largest music festival in Lafayette, it coincides with the first weekend of Jazz Fest, but it’s possible to do both on different days if you have mobility and plan your time right. For some, though, there’s no question. For them, Festival International’s smaller scale, more focused musical offerings and Lafayette setting make it the go-to festival every time.
Festival International features artists from around the globe and it has a special emphasis on performers from the Francophone world. Naturally, many local Cajun and zydeco bands are on the schedule each year.
Food booths are all over the place, with most of them provisioned by local restaurants and caterers. The offerings are pretty diverse – you can get falafel from one booth and Indian curries from another – though they don’t have the same unifying quality control and selectivity of the Jazz Fest food operation (hot dogs and pizza are part of the program). But the emphasis is really on Cajun-style festival foods, and this is great stuff. There’s a lot of boudin, many variations on crawfish etouffee, cross-cultural dishes like blackened crawfish and shrimp tamales and something intriguing called “pork popcorn,” which I’ve yet to experience. Make sure you hit the booth from Poupart’s Bakery, that Lafayette institution, for crawfish pistolettes and shrimp and tasso pasta. The Lafayette spinoff of New Orleans’ own Cochon restaurant will be there this year too, serving smoked brisket or pulled pork sandwiches and shrimp and grits.
Sometimes I wish these Jazz Fest and Festival International were on different weekends, as I think it would help more people see how wonderful Festival International really is. But perhaps it’s a blessing to keep this thing a more low-key affair than its much larger New Orleans peer. It remains free, for instance, and being held at a series of outdoor stages around Lafayette’s small but genuinely labyrinthine downtown business district makes it feel much more like a community event. If you’ve been to French Quarter Festival – or, more aptly, if you remember French Quarter Fest from a decade or so ago, when it too was smaller – you’ll recognize the vibe around the streets at Festival International.
Festival International de Louisiana is April 25-29 in downtown Lafayette. Admission is free. For directions and schedules, click here.