Eating Cheyenne Frontier Days: Bringing An Elevated Approach To So-Called Carnival Food

Carnival food is the shock comic of the culinary scene. It’s a food genre that traffics in surprise, provocation and high caloric absurdity. 

At some fairs and rodeos it can feel like the gimmick, rather than food itself, is the point, and you find yourself eating something just to say you did.

Deep fried ranch dressing, anyone?

At Cheyenne Frontier Days, concessionaires take a different tack.

You’ll still find all the classic concepts — the deep fry remains sacrosanct, and there’s plenty tendered up on a stick. 

But rather than traffic in cheap thrills, CFD’s head concessionaire, Nate Janousek, brings an elevated approach to so-called carnival food, putting the Daddy of ’Em All rodeo’s culinary experience a cut above the rest. 

“These aren’t gotcha items that are gonna make your stomach hurt,” said Janousek, whose company Fun Biz holds exclusive concessionaire contract for CFD. “We don’t just go to the store and close our eyes and point at the shelf and say, ‘All right, we're gonna fry that thing this year.’

“My goal isn't to trick people out of their hard-earned money with some gimmicky item,” 

Janousek is not above the traditions of fair food. But at CFD, he seeks to marry gimmick with sophistication, like a substantive TedTalk with a clickbaity title.  

“If you do the gimmick right, and you actually hone in on the process, the ingredients, the layers of flavor — and you're not just copycatting no one else's idea — I think the gimmick can be as good as anything,” he said. 

‘I don't think you'll see it at any fair … around’

What established fair food as a cherished tradition was its creative audacity. For too long, however, it’s been resting on its laurels, Janousek believes. 

In his extensive reconnaissance to fairs and events across the country, he’s learned that most offerings have become as figuratively stale as day-old discount donuts.

“What you see at a lot of county fairs and festivals is that they are not so concerned with variety and there's not a lot of push for creativity,” he said.

Fun Biz strives to bring audacity back, and he’s learned that tastes vary in regions around the country. What might be wildly popular in one area may not be in another.

One item that’s proved a little too funky for the CFD crowd is his Fruity Pebbles Shrimp Po’Boy, in which the sugary breakfast cereal is triply deployed in the batter, sauce and topping. It’s a multi-textured experience with layered interactions of sweetness and spice.

It starts with Gulf shrimp, which are coated in a modified fish batter that includes beer and Fruity Pebbles. It’s then doused with a sriracha-ranch sauce spiked with paprika, cayenne and seasoned salt, and thickened with Fruity Pebbles. 

It’s served on a French bun and, one final time, topped with the colorful crunchy cereal nuggets.

“You get the crunch and the sweetness as well, because we found that sweet and spicy and salty work very well with seafood, with these really large white Gulf shrimp especially,” he said.

In creations like these, Janousek draws on inspiration from travel, cultural trends and his own curiosity.

“With the po’boy, there was a time on social media when cereal was the hot thing. There were cereal pop-up stores in New York City. Rappers were doing all this wacky stuff with cereal,” he said, explaining how he both draws on the zeitgeist while differentiating himself from it.  

“You can Google anything and see what’s trending and what’s hot in the [food scene], but we don’t like to copycat,” he said. “All the cereal stuff inspired me to combine it with other ideas I’d working on, like shrimp and po’boy sandwiches, and having more variety of protein offerings at the fairs and events.”

Taste Of The Islands

At this year’s CFD, Janousek is uniquely proud of one dish in particular — a pineapple chicken bowl. 

Here he lops pineapple down the center, carves out the fruit and uses each half as a bowl. He then grills the pineapple, mixes it in with steamed rice, grilled marinated chicken, sesame seeds, green onions and teriyaki sauce. 

“This is one of our more unique items, and I don't think you'll see it at any fair, festival or rodeo anywhere around Colorado, Wyoming or Utah,” he said, explaining that it isn’t just the dish, but the quality and freshness of the processing that makes it special.  

“Different from other carnival vendors is that we marinate, process, trim, cut and rub all of our own meats here on site. We don't buy any meat that's pre-cut,” he said. 

Janousek insisted that all CFD beef is certified Angus. 

His personal favorite is the sliced brisket, which they rub and trim themselves before cooking and smoking on low heat for 15 hours. 

The quality comes across in the optics. You can see smoke rings, as well as the fat, texture and tenderness of the meat before ever taking a bite, he said. 

“A lot of vendors will take a muscle that's close to brisket and they'll cook it and chop it and mix barbecue sauce with it, and then serve it on a bun using a mashed potato scooper,” he said. “That’s a minced meat product. With ours, we're really showcasing the brisket.”

Additional crowd pleasers include a pistachio goat cheese pizza drizzled with hot honey, and a Fun Biz take on the recently viral Dubai chocolate strawberry cup.

Logistics

Any chef anywhere can make a fabulous dish for one, but scaling good food for the masses — and to eat on the go — is a different skillset altogether.

On top of the Cheyenne residents, the rodeo this year is estimated to welcome an additional 150,000 visitors, said CFD Public Relations Chair Shellie Hardsocg.

Most of these people will find themselves in line at one of 44 food vendor locations. Keeping them fed requires a lot of labor.

Prep guys, grill guys, fry guys, food handout people, cashiers and managers — it’s a small army under layers of management all following rigorous procedure and protocol.

The company has 85 full-time traveling employees, most of whom stay in custom bunkhouses built into 53-foot trailers with air conditioning, showers, cooking areas and private storage.

For CFD, it will also hire out as many as 200 local seasonal workers, including federal Job Corp workers, who house in the local college dormitories during the event.

There work begins at the warehouse where a dozen 53-foot refrigerated semis stock and disseminate food. 

Meat comes from Denver. Vegetables and produce are brought in from providers in Cheyenne, and fresh baked breads are delivered daily from the local Rotella bakery.

The food is taken to one of multiple prep kitchens, where workers focus all day on cutting, marinating and rubbing meat and putting food on sticks. From here it goes to the grill or the smoker. And from the grill it’s delivered straight to the customers’ hands.

Of course, none of that will be on the mind of rodeo goers, who will instead be focused on the blissful experience of a gimmick done right.

“We want people to have a lot of happy memories out here, but we want the food that people eat to be either at the top or the number one thing on their list when they remember the best parts about the rodeo,” Janousek said.

Contact Zakary Sonntag at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.