The State Fair's Kickoff to Summer is back in May with tons of fair food favorites
At least, it's time for its little sibling. The Kickoff to Summer at the Fair is back for its fifth year from May 22 to 25.
The four-day mini-fair brings a taste of the August get-together to spring with food trucks, fair food favorites, specialty beers, live music, shopping, and family activities around the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.
The Kickoff to Summer features nearly 40 of the Minnesota State Fair's food and beverage vendors, including a handful of fair classics like pickle pizza from Rick's Pizza, Sweet Martha's cookies, and specialty beers like Mini Donut Beer, Chocolate Chip Cookie Beer, and Key Lime Pie Beer.
Among the many vendors warming up their fair fare, Kickoff attendees will find Ball Park Cafe, Beverages by Giggles', Dino's Gyros, Fresh French Fries, Mouth Trap Cheese Curds, Pronto Pups, Richie's Cheese Curd Tacos, and Tot Boss, among others.
There will also be the Giant Slide, games from Trivia Mafia, skateboard lessons, and more.
What's new at the Kickoff in 2025:
Last year's must-try stunt food, Deep-Fried Ranch Dressing from LuLu's Public House, will be there.
New food vendors: El Burrito Mercado, Minneapple Pie, and Jersey Jo's
A Puzzle Hunt activity conceived by The Lodge of Lazarus Crowe and Trapped Puzzle Rooms.
New weekday events on Thursday and Friday, including a performance from ABBASolutely Fab on Thursday and GB Leighton on Friday.
Tickets are $13 in advance and will become available at 10 a.m. on Friday, April 4. At the door, tickets are $16 each. The fair is also selling a ticket bundle where you get a free 2025 State Fair admission with the purchase of four Kickoff to Summer tickets for Thursday or Friday.
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INdulge: Chinese dish with surprising Hoosier ties is best thing I ate in Indy this week
Seldom do I feel more like a Hoosier than when I'm at the State Fair, the only place I know of where you can eat deep-fried cheesecake and marvel at a pig roughly the size of a Toyota Yaris, all while a jazz-funk rendition of Für Elise blares over the speaker system. With the Fair in town through Aug. 17, I've started seeing Hoosier DNA where I least expect it. Take a close look and you'll even find it in: After days of subsisting largely on battered pork and dairy, I was grateful for the gastrointestinal reprieve of a bowl of mapo tofu ($13.95) from Tian Fu Chinese Food and Japanese Sushi on the far east side. More: We tried 12 wild Indiana State Fair dishes and ranked them from worst to best Mapo tofu is a popular, relatively new Chinese dish comprised of great wobbling tofu cubes in a thick broth flavored with fermented beans and chili paste. The throat-scratching stew also traditionally includes a small amount of minced beef. Most historians trace the invention of mapo tofu to the late 1800s at Chen Mapo restaurant in the Sichuan Province's capital city of Chengdu. Per popular legend, the dish was named for one of the restaurant's owners, Mrs. Chen, whom locals affectionately called mapo due to her smallpox-scarred face (ma comes from the Chinese word for pockmarks; po comes from a word meaning elderly woman or grandmother). While not exactly my idea of a pet name, 'mapo' stuck, and Chen Mapo Tofu has served diners in Chengdu for more than a century. At Tian Fu, Chen's namesake delicacy arrived at my table via a roving four-foot-tall delivery robot with cat ears and an LCD 'face' that smiled when I pet the machine at my server's behest, a kind of cute, yet off-putting twist to the dining experience that I simply don't have the word count to fully unpack here. Most importantly, the mapo was excellent. The stew features a savory garlic-spiked broth and crimson Sichuan peppercorns that speckle the tofu like little sparks of fire. The spice level isn't quite málà ('numbing hot' in Mandarin) but might give your tear ducts some exercise nonetheless. Celery and scallions bring a little crunch, the ground beef adds a nice meaty chew and the tofu provides the nutritional bulk of the meal. For the noninitiated, tofu is made by thickening and straining soy milk into jiggling protein-rich blocks of bean curd. It isn't especially pretty and it doesn't taste like much when plain, but tofu has long been a dietary staple in China. All that tofu requires an enormous soybean supply. That's where Indiana and other Midwest states with fertile, government-subsidized farmland enter the picture. Previously in INdulge: These ridiculously hot wings are (sort of) the best thing I ate in Indy this week The Hoosier State is one of the United States' biggest soybean producers, harvesting more than 9 million tons and exporting more than $2 billion worth in 2023, according to National Agricultural Statistics Service data. In the last five years China on average has purchased roughly one quarter of the United States' soybean yield to make oil and livestock feed while dedicating its own soybeans to culinary purposes (likewise, most tofu eaten in the States is made with American-grown soybeans). Imports of American soybeans in China are down a tick this year because, well — I don't know if you've heard of this thing called a trade war, but we're sort of in one. Chinese soybean processors haven't purchased American soybeans since January before the start of President Donald Trump's second term, which has seen a back-and-forth of retaliatory tariffs between the two nations. In April, Chinese tariffs on American soybeans briefly peaked at 115%. Regardless of how compelling you find Trump's reasons for initiating the trade dispute, China backing out of the American bean business has left American soybean farmers, many of them Hoosiers, facing considerable economic uncertainty. To avoid overstepping the expertise I gleaned from one semester of pandemic-era Zoom microeconomics in college, I'll refocus on the culinary component of our state's most lucrative legume. Tofu certainly isn't everyone's thing, but as a nutritionally complete flavor sponge, it's tough to beat. Tian Fu's mapo tofu is an expertly seasoned gutful of Sichuan tradition that you certainly don't need an extensive knowledge of geopolitics to appreciate; speaking purely for myself, I find matters of the soybean much easier to digest in a big spicy stew than in trade talks. What: Mapo tofu, $13.95 Where: Tian Fu Chinese Food and Japanese Sushi, 7525 E. Washington St., (317) 520-8888 and Tian Fu Asian Bistro, 3508 W. 86th St., (317) 872-6888, In case that's not your thing: Tian Fu's east side and northwest side locations offer a variety of traditional Chinese and Japanese dishes, plus plenty of familiar Chinese American favorites. House soups ($3 to $8), pot stickers and dumplings (around $6 each) precede stir fries, noodle dishes and traditional Sichuan dishes including hot boiled fish and smoked duck ($12 to $19). For dessert, diners can cool off with red bean or green tea ice cream ($4 to $5).
