'Gourmet Alley' Measures Garlic by the Ton

When you’re cooking for more than 100,000 people, ingredients don’t come in ounces and cups.

At the Gilroy Garlic Festival’s Gourmet Alley, they come in tons.

Half of the festival’s 4,000 volunteers work in “the alley,” the central attraction of the annual garlic festival and an operation that volunteers call “a city within a city.”

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun,” said Judy Filice, who helped organize the alley and has volunteered every year since the festival began 33 years ago.

All of the festival mainstays, from the longtime-favorite garlic bread to the scampi, are prepared in the alley. Volunteers work throughout the festival at stations devoted to preparing the different items.

One station, occupied by members of the Gilroy High School and Christopher High School choirs, was entirely devoted to chopping cilantro. After chopping all throughout last year’s festival, 18-year-old Sierra Sowders said she started chopping in her dreams.

“Now, whenever I eat salsa, I know exactly what all the ingredients are,” she said.

To feed the thousands of customers, Gourmet Alley Committee Chair Vito Mercado said that it takes quite a bit of ingredients, including:

• 4,000 pounds of garlic
• 10,000 pounds of beef
• 8,000 pounds of shrimp and squid
• 4,000 pounds of butter
• 8,000 loaves of bread

Even those amounts weren’t enough on Saturday, when approximately 60,000 people attended the festival and waited in lines that were up to one-and-a-half hours long.

“We were scrambling, but we were ready,” Mercado said, describing how volunteers rushed out to buy more ingredients, “No one left hungry.”

“If you needed butter in this town on Saturday, forget about it,” said Dave Bruni, gourmet alley volunteer for more than a decade.

Bruni was donating his time to Elementary School, and 30-year volunteer and Pyro Chef Mel Berman was donating his time to

“Every station has its own story,” Bruni said, pointing out how the clusters of volunteers were all earning money that would be donated to local organizations.

At the station for the new Alley Wrap, volunteers were donating their time to the

“It’s actually doing really well,” said volunteer, Kim Sullivan of the new dish.

In her 33 years of volunteering, Judy Filice said the biggest secret of making the alley happen was to work together.

That, and in the words of the current chair, lots of planning.

“We’ll start planning for next year as soon as the festival is over,” he said.