DOWNTOWN SYRACUSE – With an unmistakable blend of spices wafting through the downtown Syracuse air, Operation Northern Comfort held its 16th annual Crawfish Festival in Clinton Square on Saturday, May 6.
Previously held in April, the seafood extravaganza switched to May when the weather would be slightly less “touch and go,” but it still typically marks the debut of the festival season in Syracuse.
Apart from having the distinction of being first, the Central New York nonprofit’s festival is also scheduled to beat the end of crawfish season.
“The best quality crawfish are up until this week, and then the quality drops off,” said Cicero resident Laurel Flanagan, the CEO of Operation Northern Comfort, on May 6.
Throughout the rest of the year, Flanagan’s organization assigns itself to disaster relief in various parts of the country and assists those in need locally by providing donations and different types of labor.
While more recently the nonprofit has had volunteers help out in Houston, North Carolina, and close by in Oneida when it was hit with flooding troubles, the organization was originally formed in 2006 as a way to lend a hand cleaning up and rebuilding from the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina.
Not long after, founder and first CEO Norm Andrzejewski hatched the idea to host a crawfish-centered festival in Syracuse to pay homage to the Cajun-style cuisine of the areas they were aiding.
Joyce Reap, an early volunteer and now the chair of the festival, admits she was originally skeptical about whether people around here would be clambering for crawfish, but she came around to the idea once she saw attendees standing in line for two hours to snag some at the first-ever fest in Hanover Square.
“Every year I think we build a little bit bigger, and people seem to enjoy us,” Reap said.
One man, Ron Panetta of Liverpool, makes a point of being the first customer in line every year to place his signature request of 11 pounds of crawfish, and numerous Syracuse transplants from Louisiana have attested to the authenticity and quality of both the overall festival and its food, Flanagan said.
She said that stamp of approval, at least this time around, could partly be attributed to the three cooks in charge of boiling crawfish who hail from the fishing community of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, and a chef at the Cajun Café stand from Baton Rouge who trained at the Louisiana Culinary Institute.
The menu for the day listed not only crawfish, shrimp and clam dinners but also sausage sandwiches, pulled pork, salt potatoes, jambalaya, walking tacos and gumbo at the stands, and for dessert, attendees could order up bread pudding or beignets. There were also food trucks representing Cue Dogs, Bold Coast Lobster, Ma & Pa’s Kettle Corn, Byblos Street Grill, Carvel, Birdsong Café and It’s a Utica Thing.
Among the vendors, items like glass works, bottles of honey straight from the apiary, and pet accessories were being sold too, and for musical entertainment C’est Bon Cajun Dance Band, Letizia & The Z Band, The Fabulous Ripcords and Brass Inc. performed on the main stage with Bridget DeMarse, Christopher LeFever, Steve Maclean, Dylan Michael, Justin Parker, Kyle Miller, Caleb Liber and Michael Meredith on the acoustic stage.
When it was founded, the nonprofit entity was called Operation Southern Comfort, and then for a while it was known by both the Northern Comfort and Southern Comfort names under the same umbrella to distinguish between the projects down south and the ones nearer to home.
Once the amount of work that needed to be done in Central New York became clear, the organization incorporated as Operation Northern Comfort (ONC) solely in 2014, but the readiness to venture out of state when necessary remained.
That service trip side of the mission was put on hold for about three years due to the COVID pandemic, but it was restored in January of this year when a team of five representing the nonprofit traveled to Fort Myers, Florida, to reverse some of the damage brought about by Hurricane Ian. A second team that included Flanagan went to the same city in March.
Over the years, the trademark comfort has come in the form of putting in modifications like railings, ramps and platform lifts for senior citizens and veterans and creating better shelving for food pantries in addition to removing moldy drywall and damaged floorboards in the wake of natural disasters.
The organization’s steering committee and volunteers prepare for the Crawfish Festival all year long coordinating with a long list of sponsors, finalizing performer contracts and ordering 2,500 pounds of crawfish in total. The event serves as ONC’s primary fundraiser, and Flanagan said anyone unable to spare the time and resources to go on a service trip for ONC can always contribute to that planning process.
After outgrowing Hanover Square, subsequent moves to the New York State Fairgrounds and the Inner Harbor, and a cancellation in 2020, the festival has gotten nice and settled with the return to the more centrally located Clinton Square.
“There’s just a feel about Clinton Square with all the buildings in the backdrop,” said Flanagan, who took over as CEO of ONC at the beginning of 2022. “This is our home.”
ONC’s next service trip is to Buffalo for a week starting June 18, but Flanagan said people don’t need to make a full-week commitment to volunteer. Sign-ups are on the organization’s website, operationnc.org.