A History of Eating Contests at The Feast of San Gennaro
By Ian MacAllen on Sunday, September 14th, 2025 at 5:32 pm | 266 views
In the autumn of 2022, it was midweek of the 96th Annual San Gennaro festival in Manhattan. I had an early morning doctor’s appointment around the corner from Mulberry Street. Afterward, I walked up and down the street watching vendors setting up their tables and preparing for the afternoon’s first customers. That’s when I saw the main stage where the festival organizers were setting up for the third annual zeppole eating contest.
I texted an editor I knew. Would he be interested in a story about the Zeppole eating contest?
I was on the story. A few minutes later I was interviewing Danny Fratta, owner of Danny on The Corner, a vendor of zeppole and fried rainbow cookies. He was also sponsor of the contest and responsible for cooking up trays of zeppole for the contestants to eat. We chatted briefly before he returned to cooking.
The zeppole contest was one of four competitive eating events that year. Ferrara bakery sponsored the 24th annual cannoli eating contest, Alleva Dairy sponsored the the 5th Annual Meatball Eating Contest, and Upside Pizza sponsored the 2nd Annual Pizza eating contest. The contests were arranged throughout the festival week, in the middle of the day, designed to bring people to the fair during the slow afternoon, and as a way of creating buzz about the festival.
What nobody knew in 2022 was that it would be the last year for competitive eating at the feast. Organizers of the 2023 feast decided to cancel the eating contests. John Fratta told the New York Post that the eating contests were “not that pleasant to watch.”
Producing the contests did come with hefty price tags and lots of labor from the vendors. Ernest Lepore, the owner of Ferrara Bakery baked up 10 trays of 40 cannoli each for the contestants.
Inflation hasn’t helped either, with the raw materials costing more. John DeLutro, owner of Cafe Palermo, told the New York Post in 2024 that the price of cheese and milk had gotten very expensive, shrinking profit margins on the products they sold.
Cost was always a concern for some. I asked Danny Fratta if he would ever consider having a deep fried rainbow cookie eating contest. His zeppole stand, Danny on the Corner, sells the treats as well as zeppole. He told me they never would because the rainbow cookies simply cost too much.
The first feast in 1926 was a neighborhood block party. Residents of the area were recreating a tradition they enjoyed in Naples. The success of the festival soon turned into an economic boon for the neighborhood. The feast attracted Italian Americans from across the United States to celebrate food and culture with buses arriving from as far away as Maine and the midwest.
The festival celebrates the feast day of St. Januarius, otherwise known as San Gennaro. He served as the Bishop of Benevento just outside of Naples. In 305 AD, he was martyred, and legend holds that vials of his blood were collected and stored in the cathedral. Each year, the dried blood is expected to liquefy around September 19th. It usually does, though when it doesn’t, believes say you should expect some calamity to descend on the world. For instance, the miracle failed in the year leading into World War II.
Little Italy’s festival operates as a nonprofit generating money for charitable causes, initially for Sthe hrine Church of the Most Precious Blood on Baxter Street, but evolving over the years to include other organizations as well. Vendor fees are intended to go towards charities, as are the dollar bills pinned to San Gennaro and his shrine.
Food was always a big part of the festival with calzones, pizza, sausage and pepper sandwiches, and braciole sold from street vendors. Despite what some visitors complain about, foods from the city’s other diverse ethnic groups have always been part of the festival, paying their vendor fees to organizers like everyone else.
The festival has long been a whimsical party. One year there was an entire tunnel made from provolone cheese. Usually there’s a ferris wheel, and other children’s fair rides. Cultural events like opera are juxtaposed alongside Frank Sinatra cover bands.
And of course, there was also gambling. While the feast plays out on Mulberry Street, inside the Shrine of Most Precious Blood Church, the festival had hosted games of chance to help raise money. The legality, and tolerance, for gambling varied over the years depending in part on who held political power. Eventually the police cracked down on the casino games in the 1960s, but by then the feast as a whole had become a big business.
Competitive eating is a spectacle with a long history, but the sport really found prominence when Nathan’s Famous introduced the Independence Day hot dog eating contest in 1974. Today its televised nationally, and professionals travel the globe entering food consumption contests.
To compete with the July 4th contest, Mulberry Street restaurant Sal Anthony’s S.P.Q.R hosted spaghetti eating contests over the holiday in the early 2000s. The contestants were usually waiters from the nearby restaurants competing for a small cash prize. The contest took place in front of the restaurant along the stretch of Mulberry Street where street-side dining had long been allowed. The red sauce restaurant closed in 2013, taking the spaghetti eating contest with it.
Spaghetti wasn’t the only food eaten competitively in Little Italy though. The Mulberry Street Bar host several pizza eating contests around the 2010s. Staff from nine Little Italy restaurants duked it out for a $100 prize.
San Gennaro had a money problem. Besides the illicit gambling, there were also rumors the festival was tied to organized criminal activity, and in the mid-1990s, an ambitious mayor with a record of crime fighting was elected, promising to clean up the festival.
During the 1990s, street festivals generally had been abusing the city’s permitting process. In part this strategy originated with two private companies with origins in the San Gennaro festival. The barricades, tables, and lighting systems were all rented by festival organizers, but San Gennaro only used those items for two weeks out of the year. To make owning the equipment profitable, the rental companies began promoting street fairs around the city.
The street fair rules in the city had originally been intended to allow community building. But over time, as two companies came to dominate the process, the fairs became overly generic, copy cats with nearly identical vendors. The city’s lax rules on street festivals made it an easy way to generate income with low permit costs and little oversight.
Then New York City elected Rudy Giuliani mayor. A prosecutor, Giuliani vowed to crack down on corruption, and turned his sights on the San Gennaro festival. He even pointed fingers at the Genovese family for mismanaging the festival’s financial affairs and skimming profits.
Members of the Genovese family were indicted on charges stemming from funds earned in the 1993 and 1994 festivals. Giuliani wanted to wrest control of the festival from the original founders and install his own allies in place. To make his point, Giuliani then cancelled the permit for the 1996 festival.
A year earlier, Giuliani had installed former prosecutor John C Sabetta to oversee the festival funds. The festival was forced to pay Sabetta’s fees for auditing their books, while handing over decisions about vendors and disbursements. He eventually recommended that the Society of San Gennaro Naples and Suburbs be banned from operating the festival.
A new organization, the Figli di San Gennaro, was created to organize and run the festival. Under Giuliani’s thumb, old vendors were banned, including those that provided the famous lights that lined Mulberry Street. They were not installed, and the Ferris Wheel was not issued a permit either.
That’s when festival organizers decided to add a cannoli eating contest as a new kind of attraction.
The rules at the first event gave contestants 6 minutes to chow down on as many cannolis as they could eat, with winners shoving more than two dozen down. I couldn’t find any record of the early winners, but it proved a popular enough event to attract professional eaters. A few years in, the contest caught the attention of Major League Eating, which airs the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July competition.
The cannoli contest steadily grew in notoriety, attracting professional level eaters who started eating more and more cannoli. The winners in early contests typically were eating 16 to 20 cannoli. But this number slowly increased into the 30s by the time the contests ended in 2022. Wayne Algenio is likely the record holder at San Gennaro, downing 38 in 2019.
One caveat is that there are some variations in the competitions year over year. In some years, contestants noted that the cannolis were more difficult to eat either because the shells were thicker or there was more filling.
After twenty years of cannoli eating, the feast added the meatball eating contest. The sponsor in 2016 was the Alleva Dairy. The dairy was established in 1892 and operated at the corner shop overlooking Mulberry and Grand Street, at the center of the feast.
The first judge of the contest in 2016 was Tony Danza. Yes, the Tony Danza, star of shows like Who’s The Boss?. Danza was a partner at the Alleva Dairy, and he even worked the counter on occasion.
The original eight minute contest saw winner Michael Pinga down 47 meatballs. The time allotment for the meatball contest varied a bit from year to year making direct comparisons difficult, but in 2021, Wayne Alegnio downed 100 meatballs to take the crown. Again, there’s no accounting for variation in size.
Unfortunately, facing a rent dispute with their landlords, the original Alleva Dairy shut down in 2023 reopening in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. It’s possible of course, this was another reason compounding the decision to end the competitive eating that year.
The 2022 Zeppole contest was the first competitive eating event I ever attended. After interviewing Danny Fratta, the sponsor of the event, I took a spot at the edge of the crowd. I wanted to position myself to snap some photos.
Soon the chairs put out for the audience were filled and the street became crowded. A lot of people had showed up in the middle of the afternoon to watch this event.
There was plenty of ceremony leading up to the start of the contest. Festival producer Mort Berkowitz worked the crowd. There were local celebrities too, like Mario Bosco, an actor and comedian.
A procession carried the trays of zeppole to the contestants on stage. Then just before they started, white powdered sugar was ladled on each tray. No doubt the dry mouth created by the sugar slowed down the eating.
The six minutes ground on. Berkowitz kept the tension up as best he could, but how much drama is there watching a dozen people shove food into their mouths?
In the end, Kyle Mendez won with 46 zeppole–not a record, but notable as the last declared winner of the contest. Wayne Algenio’s 2019 record of 54 will seemingly stand indefinitely now. At least, in Manhattan.
The popularity of competitive eating can’t be denied. The Santa Rosalie Feast in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn has a cannoli eating contest, now in its third year. Festivals beyond the city have added competitive eating too. The Feast of San Gennaro hosted in the Hamptons continues to host contests for cannoli, zeppole, meatball, and pizza while Belmar, New Jersey hosted a cannoli contest this year.
For now, the festival continues from September 11 through September 21. There will still be plenty of zeppole, cannoli, meatbals, and pizza, but visitors will have to be satisfied eating it themselves rather than watching professionals choke them down in timed heats.
