The Gibby’s Dilemma

Last year was my 26th Cherry Festival as a Traverse City resident. For those twentyplus years I had puzzled over one of the great dilemmas of the ages. It was consuming my waking hours and it was time to heal myself and make a final decision. I came to this realization at Gibbyville when last July I found myself once again facing that age-old decision: elephant ear or funnel cake.

Once a year, like clockwork, the Gibby’s people drag their trailers full of hot fat to our fair city and offer what many believe to be the finest fried food in the world. The National Cherry Festival has changed over the years; they’ve canceled events, moved the stage, and even considered shortening it to only four days. But no one, not one person, would suggest having a Cherry Festival without Gibby’s.

A bit of background: Gibby’s is perhaps most famous for their “good” fries. Small, large, or bucketful, every kid who grows up in Traverse City knows you need an order of Gibby’s good fries at least once each July. The Cherry Festival isn’t about queens or parades, not even cherries; sometimes we have to bring in sweet cherries from Washington when the crop is late. No, Cherry Festival is about eating foods that are really bad for you.

Gibby’s good fries are not particularly light and crispy like the classic Golden Arches. The Gibby’s secret is closely guarded, but I’m pretty sure it involves frying them twice to get the fat just a little deeper into the potato. If you could eat them every week they would quickly lose their charm. It would be gross to eat them everyday. But when you can have these limp greasy fries only one week a year, they are oddly desirable.

Fries are where the Gibby experience starts, but the real gibficionado knows it’s all about dessert. You can’t eat both an elephant ear and a funnel cake in the same year, especially if in the same week you also have a small order of fries. It’s technically legal, but the scholarship is thin. It’s not known if anyone has tried eating both an elephant ear and funnel cake and lived long enough to write about it; most of us mere mortals have to pick one of the two. The choice is always followed by that nagging doubt, sometimes even before the last bit of fried dough is gone: “Should I have gone for the batter?”

Just so you know, the elephant ear isn’t an ear at all. The people of Thailand will be happy to know it’s not even made from elephant (note to vegans, this is proof that “vegetarian” does not mean “good for you”). An elephant ear is a big piece of raw yeast bread, something about the size of a small pizza before the sauce and cheese. It’s fried and that’s it. It’s only becomes dessert when you sprinkle it with a generous flow of cinnamon sugar.

Not surprisingly, funnel cakes have nothing to do with funnels. Or for that matter cake. A 10” stainless steel ring is placed in hot oil. Batter is dripped into the oil in a thin wiggly dribble (this may be where the funnel was once used, but now it’s a metal pitcher with a thin spout). Once the ring is full of squiggles of frying batter, it bubbles and hisses for a few minutes until the ring is lifted off and the “cake” is flipped to brown the other side. All by itself the funnel cake is a bit sweet, like a waffle without syrup. But the real beauty of the funnel cake is its many crevices and wrinkles that hold the cinnamon sugar.

I must make a brief statement about toppings. While I recognize that powdered sugar is a legitimate, though misguided, alternative to cinnamon sugar, I reject whole-heartedly any other topping. Cherries belong in a pie. Put custard in Napoleons. Chocolate sauce goes on ice cream. Both elephant ears and funnel cakes are only complete with cinnamon sugar and nothing else. Enough said.

So there I was on Union Street, the elephant ear trailer was on the east side of the street and the funnel cake booth on the west. This was is a classic left/right decision. I was hungry, so the doughy near-food value of the elephant ear seemed like the sensible choice. If they are cooked just right, there will be a few places where the thin crust gets crispy and the cinnamon sugar mixes with the grease to make a sweet, gooey crunch. The funnel cake, on the other hand, is all about crispy. The irregular dribbled batter gives the 10” round funnel cake the surface area of donut the size of an extralarge pizza. And that’s when it hit me.

The funnel cake can hold more cinnamon sugar. On the elephant ear the sugar just falls off into your lap. Beyond the crusty exterior of the elephant ear there is a doughy interior. It’s almost good for you. The funnel cake, on the other hand, is nearly all crispy, fried surfaces. More crunch, more grease, plenty of sugar, and no discernable food value. The funnel cake is pure guilty pleasure, no pretense; it’s my kind of treat.

It was time for a decisive move, and the funnel cake is the bold, no apology dessert for me. Right there on Union Street I said goodbye to the elephant ear. I won’t waste any more time wondering. If you are looking for me at Cherry Festival, I’ll be the guy with a contented smile and a funnel cake. It’s good to have that settled.

Thomas Kachadurian is a photographer, designer and author. He lives on Old Mission with his wife and two children. He is a member and past president of the Traverse Area District Library Board of Trustees.

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