‘Enjoy all this weirdness’: Spokane enters 44th year of Pigging Out in the Park

A boy in New Jersey used to walk the Atlantic City boardwalk with his great aunt, visiting the booths that lined the river. The boy, Bill Burke, would grow up to start Spokane’s YUM YUM Restaurant Fair in 1979 – these days called Pig Out in the Park. “I was just coming this way,” Burke said, sitting at the Riverfront Park Rotary Fountain on Wednesday, gesturing towards the bridge. “It was early in the evening, and the sun was going down, and then all of the sudden, it was just Atlantic City.”

The food and music event he ended up introducing takes over downtown Spokane annually, drawing hungry visitors by the thousands. This year, the event cost around $570,000 to host, funded by sponsors. Despite some other events in the Northwest this year reporting a decrease in attendance, Burke said that he expects Pig Out to hold onto the roughly 80,000 attendees that showed last year.

Six-year-old Henley Morse was walking through Pig Out setup with her grandma on the way to the Looff Carrousel – a tradition between the pair prior to school starting back up. Henley said her papa might bring her to the main event tomorrow. “I don’t remember what it’s called, but I like the donut that has sugar on it,” she said. Grandma Raeleen Daffin, 62, tends to gravitate more towards the music-filled beer gardens scattered throughout the park.

Pig Out in the Park only really took off about six or seven years after it began, in the ’80s. Burke said a local radio station offered to bring Jamaican-American reggae musician Shaggy to perform at the event. He had no idea who Shaggy, who would later sing the hit song “Boombastic,” was. “Well, he showed up, and our 10,000-person dinner party over here went to 25 to 30 thousand all of the sudden,” Burke said. “There were people in the trees on top of River Park Square, there were people standing on top of city hall.”

These days, most of the performing bands are either cover bands or local groups, Burke said. A few highlights to keep an eye out for this year include AC/DC cover band BC/DC, the Blues Beetles from Brazil and raspy-voiced rapper Tone Loc.

Friends Tina Funk and Dean Morfitt, both 59, were “checking to see what we can do tomorrow” as food vendors were setting up Wednesday. Though Morfitt is native to Coeur d’Alene, he said this year will be his second at the festival. “I love the fact that people get out to actually enjoy some food,” he said, adding that “it’s better than McDonald’s,” for sure. Morfitt said that while the food can be pricey, his strategy is to buy the $6 bites offered each day from 3 to 5 p.m. and 8 to 10 p.m. “That’s where you can kind of go to try something different,” he said. “Then you can go, ‘Well, I’ll take the whole thing!’ You don’t want to buy a whole something you’re going to throw away anyways.”

For vendors, Pig Out in the Park is a lucrative venture, but they come for more than the money.

Chris Kim, owner of Langostino Sushi Burrito/Tornado Potato, has been doing Pig Out for around five years, driving over from Seattle. “Very friendly environment, for a good – not, like, big – city,” Kim said. “So kinda a little laidback, and people are very friendly.”

Adwoa Dorcas Awuah was helping set up the African Cuisine booth. With a menu featuring foods of West Ghana, one of Awuah’s colleagues brought the spices for the dishes back after visiting the country. The food, while a bit less spicy than is typical, is as authentic as possible.

When it comes to Jollof rice, Awuah said, Ghana does it best. “We are all immigrants, but currently citizens. When we got here, we found it very difficult to get any kind of food that was native, like, even common to us,” she said. “We want people to come out and try it out. Spokane is a diverse community, and we want Spokane to taste our African cuisine – West African dishes – and it’s delicious.”

The African Cuisine business, Awuah said, is an “upcoming” restaurant. Though licensed, they do not have a physical location yet. “Currently, brick and mortar, getting a place, it’s high risk,” she said. “So we have to do these kind of events for a while so we can make some funds and get our own place.”

Burke said Riverfront Park is the best venue in the whole of the Northwest, with its location, Expo ’74 legacy, population and size.

With “perfect food weather” coming up in the next few days, he says that coming down to Pig Out in the Park is a good way to take a break from the financial, political and personal stresses that plague many folks. “It’s a chance for the community to come down and enjoy themselves and get away from all the weirdness in the world and come down and enjoy all this weirdness.”