International Fare Adds Flavor to Orange Fair

Three hours after his grandparents brought him to the Orange International Street Fair on Saturday, 10-year-old Ben Thomas was toting a five-foot balloon and rubbing his stomach with a big smile, recounting his culinary conquests.

“Bratwurst, Indian fried bread, teriyaki, Danish doughnuts.” Even as he spoke, Ben was nibbling on steak tacos.

“He eats everything,” said Ben’s grandfather, Bob Smith, who came from Riverside with his wife and the youngster to attend the festival.

This wasn’t their first trip. “In the last 10 years, we missed maybe two,” Smith said.

While the wide variety of dishes was unquestionably the main attraction, the 22nd annual fair also featured nine outdoor stages and more than 73 crafts booths in downtown Orange.

Entitled “A Family Affair,” the event, which began Friday night, is expected to draw as many as 500,000 people and raise between $1.5 million and $3 million for nonprofit service groups before it ends at 10 this evening.

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Judy Solee, president of this year’s event, said it is the main fund-raiser for many organizations, which use the proceeds for purposes ranging from equipping school baseball teams to operating shelters for the homeless.

Some who browsed along the rows of food booths Saturday still remembered the aromas of cooking in the foreign land where they were born. Others came with a craving for delicacies passed down through the generations here.

On “Greek Street,” Tom Peters was raising funds for St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church in Anaheim by selling “loukoumathes,” a light pastry ball drenched in a mixture of lemon and honey.

“Obviously my parents changed their name when they came here,” said Peters, whose Greek ancestors bore the name Dimitrakapoulous. “Just try to fit that on an American Express card,” he said.

There is a Greek community in Orange County, but it usually goes unnoticed, Peters said. “We keep a low profile, so to speak.”

Same goes for the Danes, said P.K. Egense, 74. He arrived in Southern California 38 years ago from Odense, Denmark, the town where writer Hans Christian Andersen was born, he noted proudly.

Egense recalled how difficult it was for his family to obtain an immigration visa. “It took 18 months,” he said, “while our background was investigated.”

On Saturday, Egense was in charge of the food booth run by the Viking Club of Orange County. Its Danish pastries, with powdered sugar and raspberry jelly, were so popular that the club ran out of dough Friday night and had turned customers away while waiting to be resupplied the next morning.

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It was a day for people to be adventurous, to try something new. “What is spumoni?” asked a man at the Sons of Italy ice-cream booth. He soon enjoyed his first taste of the fruity treat. “Really, Italians were the first who created ice cream,” said Gary Winkler, who was doling out the treats.

Tippi Uprmai of Irvine, a restaurateur who created a Thai food booth for boosters of the Tustin High School baseball team, acknowledged that because Thai food is generally too spicy for American tastes, “we mixed in Japanese tempura and Chinese egg rolls.”

Uprmai said it took a month to prepare all the food for the booth.

By early afternoon, Bob Spidell, 60, wearing a straw hat to protect himself from the hot sun, was on his second helping of bratwurst. His son, 29, suggested their zest for the dish reflected their German heritage.

But Spidell was dubious. Pointing to the paunch under his plaid shirt, he confessed, “Actually I like all kinds of food, as you can tell.”