Editorial: Celebrate National Garlic Month with downtown Gilroy merchants
Published in the April 5 – 19, 2017 issue of Gilroy Life
Will Rogers in 1922
Will Rogers enjoyed visiting our South Valley region, sometimes hanging out with ranch hands during branding season at the Quien Sabe Ranch in San Benito County. In the 1930s, the cowboy comedian would stop at the Milias Hotel in downtown Gilroy where he’d enjoy a tasty meal at its locally-famous restaurant. In one of his newspaper columns, Rogers even made a joke about the city’s garlic ag industry, calling Gilroy “the only place in America where you can marinate a steak by hanging it on a clothesline.”
Rogers might appreciate how much Gilroy’s garlic reputation has grown in the past 80 or so years since he last visited. He’d be impressed with the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival and how it brings people from around the world to taste foods and beverages related to “the stinking rose.” And now the Gilroy Downtown Business Association is getting involved in building the city’s garlicky reputation, with retail and restaurant merchants celebrating April as National Garlic Month — and a special National Garlic Day-themed evening mixer at Bella Viva Ristorante April 19.
Fittingly for Will Rogers, Gilroy Life Publisher Marty Cheek recently sat down for lunch at Milias with the business association’s coordinator, Melanie Corona, and board president, Gary Walton, to discuss the plans for the garlic celebration through April.
The merchants will have special promotions, including having each participating business give free raffle tickets to people who come into their stores to put into containers for a chance to win a gift basket filled with various items from the stores as well as tickets to the association’s annual Wine Stroll (this year held May 20), tickets to the Gilroy Garlic Festival and tickets to Gilroy Gardens theme park. Downtown Gilroy already has the Garlic City Mercantile shop, which features lots of garlicky goods, so shoppers have an excellent store to start their adventure exploring the downtown.
One product we would love to see in April at local restaurants and stores is garlic beer brewed for Gilroyans.
“I had a brewmaster put together a garlic beer for me,” Walton said. “It was a dark beer, and we used black garlic, which is fermented. When you ferment anything, the sugar has that kind of molasses kind of smell, so it really worked out for a dark beer.”
People who got a taste of this concoction came back for seconds, he said.
“I tried it and I think it would be great with a nice steak,” he said. “It has a garlic after-bite a little bit. It’s still garlic, but fermenting it makes it totally different.”
Corona described the goal of downtown celebrating National Garlic Month as a way to grow more events for the merchants to encourage people to discover the historic center of Gilroy. She hopes people might get into the celebration spirit and put on garlic hats or even dress up as garlic bulbs as they shop and go into the restaurants and order garlic-laced food from the menus. She hopes residents provide feedback for more fun ideas on how to make it better next year.
“This year’s goal was to establish a kind of baseline and get a feel for what the community wants, what works for the business owners and what works well for the organizations in terms of time and volunteer effort,” she said.
Walton said the business association will seek ways to work with the Gilroy Garlic Festival Association, also based in an office downtown, and find ways to mutually promote garlic endeavors that help each other’s organizations.
“Just like the festival is a huge fundraiser for the community, I think having another garlic-themed event for the downtown (in April) would be a big boost to our organization as well as maybe some other groups,” he said. “We felt it was an opportunity just sitting there.”
There are other garlic fests throughout the world, including Gilroy’s sister city Takko-machi in Japan, which even has a garlic museum. (Hey, that might be something for Gilroy merchants to consider to encourage people to visit the downtown throughout the year. It might start with the original Garlic King, Kiyoshi “Jimmy” Hirasaki, the Japanese-American farmer who people at the Gilroy History Museum say started growing garlic commercially in the 1930s and founded the local industry.)
The downtown association encourages not just Gilroy residents to participate but invites people from Morgan Hill and San Martin to attend as well. And while we’re on the subject of celebrating our ag history, we encourage people of Gilroy to join the fun at the 38th Annual Morgan Hill Mushroom Mardi Gras, held Memorial Day weekend in downtown Morgan Hill May 27 and 28. There will sure to be scampi and other garlic-laden dishes for food fans.
Walton’s comment on garlic beer prompted a Google search of the product to see how popular it was. We found, much to Cheek’s ancestral delight (with his distant relative, Sir John Cheke, keeping his manor there), that the Isle of Wight in the southern tip of England has an annual summer garlic festival that brings in about 25,000 visitors. This year’s festival will be held Aug. 19 and 20. One of its popular attractions is beer made with black garlic. Perhaps some enterprising local brewery might wish to make a large batch of a similar garlic-laced suds for this year’s Gilroy Garlic Festival. Just like garlic ice cream is always a hit, it could very well be the talk of this year’s festival, which will be held at Christmas Hill Park July 28-30.
Meanwhile, get your garlic fix this month in downtown Gilroy among the stores and restaurants. April is the time to celebrate the pungent herb that made our South Valley city internationally famous.