Newport’s riverfront smells like frying goetta this weekend, but the dish began far from a festival stage.
German immigrants arriving in 19th-century Cincinnati brought a grain sausage designed to stretch scarce meat with inexpensive oats.
In Porkopolis, that early Cincinnati goetta tradition found exactly the right place to survive. The city’s slaughterhouses and butcher shops turned a household thrift food into something the whole region would eventually claim as its own.
Glier’s Goettafest now fills Newport’s Festival Park with more than 50 variations on that food, two stages of live music, and the self-proclaimed “world’s only goetta vending machine.” The festival runs through today, then returns July 30 through August 2. People wait in line to pay for dishes centered on a food that began as a way to make expensive meat last longer. That’s an unusual journey for any regional specialty. It’s even more unusual that Cincinnati never stopped eating it.
From Family Recipe to Cincinnati Goetta Industry
Robert Glier opened a sausage shop on Pike Street in Covington in 1946. He worked out of a small kitchen and smokehouse. What he built has grown into the largest commercial goetta producer in the world. The company now moves more than two million pounds a year, according to its own figures.
That’s the part most people know. What’s less visible is everything Cincinnati built around the dish once one family’s recipe started drawing a crowd. The festival began as a small customer thank-you party in 2001. It’s now in its third decade, running two weekends and eight days. Grocery stores across Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana carry it. Restaurant menus build around goetta sandwiches, casseroles and vegan versions, the same Restaurant Week spirit that fills tables across the region every spring. The regional identity runs deep enough that people ship it to relatives who’ve moved away. Few American cities have taken a dish this humble this far, the way other big events turn local habits into full tourism draws.
Two Companies, One Cincinnati Goetta Obsession
Glier’s isn’t the only serious name in goetta. The region’s loyalty splits more than the festival’s marketing lets on…