Saturday mornings in Whiting still start the same way they have for years: coffee, then a walk to the farmers market in front of City Hall, where the tables are already out with tomatoes, fresh bread, and whatever the last of the summer flowers happen to be that week. This Saturday, September 12, that same walk keeps going. Head north a few blocks and the smell of cumin and fried dough starts to compete with the market's produce, because Whiting Lakefront Park is filling up for the fifth annual Empanada Fest, and by mid-morning the lake will be doing its usual job of making everything look better than it has any right to.
If you've lived here for more than a year, you already know Whiting doesn't lack for festivals. Pierogi Fest owns the calendar every July, a parade and food line that has grown from a fifty-foot stretch of sidewalk in 1994 into a mile-long event drawing more than 300,000 people and serving over a million pierogies a year, with enough national attention to land the city on the Food Network and the Travel Channel. Empanada Fest is not trying to be that. It draws an estimated 10,000 people, which sounds small only until you realize what those 10,000 people are actually funding.
The festival that started because one person didn't want to lose something
Empanada Fest exists because Rebecca Uate Michko, a Whiting councilwoman for more than two decades and the only Hispanic member of the council, watched the city's Hispanic community keep growing and didn't see anything on the calendar that reflected it. Her mother had been the first person to own a home in Whiting's Hispanic community more than 70 years ago. Michko has said the idea for the festival started as something much smaller, closer to a picnic, until sponsors and volunteers turned it into a full city event.
She and a small group founded the Whiting Hispanic Heritage Organization in 2021 to make it official, and the first Empanada Fest ran on September 11, 2022. It sold out of empanadas within hours, which nobody on the organizing team had planned for. Four festivals later, the format has held: live music, food and craft vendors, a beer garden, and a free kids' area, all built around a food that, as Michko has put it, most people can't easily make or find anywhere else in the region.
This year's edition keeps the same shape organizers have used since the beginning: live music, food and craft vendors, a beer garden, and a free kids' zone, running 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Whiting Lakefront Park with Notre Dame Federal Credit Union back as presenting sponsor. Last year's festival gives a sense of scale, with more than 20 food vendors on site and a main stage that brought in touring act La Sonora Dinamita alongside DJ Chops for an evening of dancing. The park itself does a lot of the work here too: a boardwalk along the lake, four tennis courts, a fishing pier and pond, and pavilions that make it easy to claim a shaded spot and stay a while. Whihala Beach and its inflatable WhoaZone obstacle course sit right next door if the empanada line gets long and the kids need to burn energy in the water instead.
Eight people, a hundred volunteers, and where the money actually goes
Here's the detail that changes how you look at the whole day. As of last year's festival, the Whiting Hispanic Heritage Organization ran on eight core members. That's the entire group behind an event that pulls in an estimated 10,000 people. Parks Superintendent Adi Cruz, who has helped shape the event's layout since the beginning, has described it as a handful of organizers turning into something big once volunteers and the community pitch in. Roughly 100 volunteers show up on festival day to cover buses, golf carts, safety, and setup, and local schools and businesses fill in the rest with donated supplies and sponsorships.
Michko has said the group started this nonprofit with no money and built it up from there. In 2024, that meant giving out more than $20,000 in scholarships. By 2025, the total had climbed to $36,936. Planning runs year-round for a single Saturday: the team starts booking entertainment as early as January to line up with Hispanic Heritage Month and Mexican Independence Day, and meetings continue weekly as the date approaches.
"We started this nonprofit with no money. We try to give back as much as we can to our Hispanic community."
That's the part worth sitting with if you already live here and have been treating Empanada Fest as just another item on the September calendar. Pierogi Fest is a regional draw with sponsors, national press, and a scale that makes it a different kind of event entirely. Empanada Fest is smaller by design, run by a handful of neighbors, and it converts a single Saturday of vendor fees, sponsorships, and beer garden sales directly into tuition money for local kids. The lakefront setting isn't incidental either. Cruz has said the park's location is a big part of why the event works as well as it does, giving the festival room to breathe along the water instead of squeezing into a parking lot somewhere.
What the rest of the day looks like if you're already there
For anyone building their Saturday around the festival, the practical shape of the day looks something like this:
- Morning: farmers market at City Hall, then a walk north toward the lakefront as vendors finish setting up
- Midday through afternoon: food and craft vendors, the beer garden, and the Familia Zone for kids
- Evening: the main stage picks up with live music and dancing until the 10 p.m. close
- Anytime you need a break from the crowd: Whihala Beach and the boardwalk are a short walk from the festival grounds
None of this requires advance tickets or special planning. It's the kind of day that works whether you show up for twenty minutes on your way to somewhere else or plant a chair by the water and stay until the lights come up on the main stage.
The calendar doesn't stop here
Whiting's fall lineup keeps going past this weekend. The Whiting-Robertsdale Chamber of Commerce is already gearing up for its Halloween festival on 119th Street, Wickedly Whiting, set for the first weekend of October, with spooky vendors, a beer garden, live entertainment, and costume contests spread across downtown. It's billed as the only all-Halloween festival in the region, and it turns the same historic strip of 119th Street that hosts the farmers market and the holiday parade into something considerably weirder for a weekend.
That's really the throughline here. Whiting's festival calendar isn't one giant event surrounded by quiet months. It's a rhythm: the farmers market every Saturday through fall, Empanada Fest carrying Hispanic Heritage Month into the lakefront, Wickedly Whiting taking over downtown a few weeks later, and Pierogi Fest still the anchor every July. Each one is organized by a different small group of neighbors who decided the city needed something and then built it themselves. Empanada Fest just happens to be the clearest example of how far a handful of people can stretch a single Saturday.
If you want a closer look at what makes Whiting tick day to day, our neighborhood guide to Whiting has more on the area's parks, walkability, and lakefront access. And if you're ever curious how any of this local texture factors into home values or timing a move in or out of Whiting, Liz Pilot is always glad to talk it through, no festival required.
