The 2026 Minnesota State Fair Food and Drink Mega-Roundup

Welcome, dear readers, to the 16th annual expedition of the Heavy Table Wrecking Crew to the Great Minnesota Get-Together.

As is our custom, our team of writers, illustrators, and photographers hit the ground running on Day 1 of the Minnesota State Fair in order to eat and drink our way voraciously across the landscape for your benefit.

A big thank you before we start: Twin Cities PBS and their new documentary series Relish Presents have underwritten this deranged odyssey of culinary adventure and we’re grateful to them for their support.

Below you’ll find candid notes on nearly 50 different foods and dozens more drinks. We’ve compiled these without fear or favor, praising the delicious and thrifty and skewering the disgusting and overpriced.

If you’re a paying subscriber to the Heavy Table, cheers and thank you - your dues make this (increasingly) expensive tradition possible, and we hope that you’ll find our cheers and jeers make your own trips to the Fair a little more reliably delicious.

If you’re not a paying subscriber, this post will open up for everyone to enjoy next week Wednesday, September 2.

The Minnesota State Fair is a celebration of everything we love about food — sharing it, discovering it, and the people who bring it to life.

This August, continue the journey with Relish Presents, a new documentary series from Twin Cities PBS celebrating the chefs, makers, and community leaders shaping Minnesota’s food culture.

At the heart of Relish Presents are six compelling stories featuring Alex Roberts, Lachelle Cunningham, Mecca Bos, Amalia Moreno Damgaard, Karyn Tomlinson, and Mateo and Erin Mackbee. Together, they offer a fresh perspective on the people, traditions, and communities shaping Minnesota’s food culture.

Whether you’re discovering a new favorite at the Fair or planning your next local food adventure, Relish Presents invites you to meet the people behind the food that brings us together.

Watch Relish Presents on Saturday, August 29 at 10:30 am, airing on TPT 2 and streaming on YouTube and on the PBS App.

Have you noticed in recent years that the Fair seems more and more expensive - in every way? It’s no illusion - from the cost of admission to the cost of food and drink to the cost of parking (thanks, Falcon Heights), the entire enterprise has gone from relative bargain to sweat-inducing splurge.

When we started our Fair roundups back in 2010, we brought around $200 in cash to cover our food expenses. This year we took out $700 in twenties, with little confidence that we wouldn’t have to grab our credit card to cover some gaps. It makes other gaps in hospitality (the ravaged, unusable Food Building stripped of its tables, freakin’ Falcon Heights charging $25 to park on the street, the general lack of easily accessible water) feel that much more painful. Get bent, Falcon Heights!

So: as much as we can this year, we’ll be laser-focused on value. We’ll be eyeballing portion sizes as well as quality and constantly hunting for values to celebrate and price-gouging to groan at. Check our “$26 Burning a Hole in Our Pockets” feature for our contributors’ takes on the best way to spend a modest $26 culinary budget during your trip to the Fair. And learn from our mistakes - we’ll be eating and drinking so much that we’ll happily take the landmines so that you don’t have to.

Old School Vs. New School | James Norton
Strawberries Deals (And More Often, Not Deals) Forever | Bill Childs
Blue Ribbon Bargains | Stacy Brooks
Not Too Sweet/Way Too Sweet | Amy Rea
NEW DRINKS AT THE FAIR 2026 | Louis Livingston Garcia
What If The Friday’s Appetizer Menu, But A Little Different And At The Fair? | Bill Childs
Meat and Potatoes | Jeanne Lakso
Everything But the Oink | Eli Radtke
$26 Burning a Hole in Our Pockets | Staff

It’s easy to get set in one’s ways, and demand that old-school foods stay that way forever. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se - that’s how Europe got to curate some of the world’s all-time culinary classics, while we Americans experience Turkey-Blasted Spicy Doritos-Filled Oreos.

But the name of the game at the Minnesota State Fair is culinary innovation, and we’re nothing if not receptive to good intentions. So without further ado, here’s an eight-item rundown comparing new Fair foods with their old-school inspirations, starting with the best, moving on to the rest, and ending with “it blew up on the launchpad, please fetch one of those foamy all-purpose fire extinguishers.”

This item - high on my list of “Things I probably won’t remember after trying them” - is one of the real shockers of 2026. It’s fantastic.

The contrast and complement of fried sweet plantains and legit spicy fried chicken plus seemingly random but utterly delightful little mini beef sambusas is a feast for the mind as well as the mouth. Straight up delicious, also legitimately fun to eat. A perfect Fair food.

NEWBIE VS. CLASSIC VERDICT: I would be hard pressed to like anything more than classic fried chicken, but the Peri-Peri Bowl takes that dish on such a surprising and rewarding journey that I felt legitimately enriched on a personal level. New school for the win. A home run.

Many questions have tormented humanity without resolution, including: Is the soul immortal? Is perpetual motion attainable? Why did they keep making Ghostbusters movies when the first one was essentially perfect? Does this shirt make me look fat?

Add to the list: How do you pronounce “Taulelle”? Is it “Tall-Ell?” “Too-Ellie?” “Ta-Lu-Lah?” Is this something we can ever really resolve? Probably not.

At any rate: Taulelle’s is offering a twist on the Fair classic funnel cake that adds a mellow hit of pumpkin plus cinnamon and a topping of cinnamon cream cheese frosting. The flavor is warm and soothing, the cream cheese frosting adds interest without being too sweet, and the size of the thing is massive, making for a truly good value. A smash success of a dish.

NEWBIE VS. CLASSIC VERDICT: 100% new-school on this - Taulelle’s has taken a fairly tired staple festival food and reinvigorated it with depth and interest. A solid triple in baseball terms.

We’ve never really seen the point of whoopie pies, which tend to be dry, boring, and sort of like a tedious homemade riff on a Ho-Ho, itself a fairly mediocre dessert. But the Dino’s Gyros Dubai Chocolate twist on the whoopie pie actually works, and quite well - the thick, creamy pistachio filling puts up a real fight against the cakey exterior and the filo / honey / brown sugar / pistachio topping offers some pleasant crunch and contrast.

Is it expensive at $13? Kinda, but considering the $20 Dubai chocolate bars we’ve seen at gas stations (!), this is actually a fair bit of joy for an acceptably steep price tag.

NEWBIE VS. CLASSIC VERDICT: The Dubai version wins. It’s not hard to elevate the whoopie pie, but anything can be screwed up at the Fair, and Dino’s actually nailed the brief by bringing a lot of interest and fun to a generally uninteresting dish.

This Hmong-style sausage bursts with flavor and offers surprising depth for a Fair food, and the accompanying citrus Kua Txob sauce adds a satisfyingly cool bite to complement the meat. The mostly flavorless corn dog jacket feels pointless, beyond cosmetics (the sausage isn’t necessarily gorgeous on its own), but the sausage and sauce combo works for certain. What maybe doesn’t work: $16 for a single not-massive sausage on a stick. [1]

NEWBIE VS. CLASSIC VERDICT: The answer to this question depends 100% on your own relationship with money. If you’re happy to spend freely at the Fair and not really checking your wallet as you go, the Hmong corndog brings a lot of zazz and excitement to an old-school food and will be a welcome twist on an old favorite. If you’re the type to count your pennies and rail against price gougers, paying sixteen freaking dollars for a regular sized sausage wearing a jacket of fried batter will probably get your goat. Scrooges beware.

An “elote” treatment is an easy way to dress up just about anything - throw some Tajín, corn, and a creamy sauce on something starchy, and Mission Accomplished. Does an elote topping elevate a basket of otherwise mediocre tater tots? Yes. Does it make for a meal worth savoring? Not really. But $9 buys you a lot of decent calories, and you absolutely can do worse for your dollar.

NEWBIE VS. CLASSIC VERDICT: Well... this is a tie. Classic tater tots are fine. These elote tots are a little more expensive, but a little more fun, and ultimately... fine. Everybody gets a passing grade here.

We get it: The whole thing with French Meadow is that the food is expensive. That’s how you know it’s fancy! Case in point: the restaurant’s shakshuka meatballs cost, on an ounce-by-ounce basis, about four times more than a new Lexus RX 350. [2]

We’re not against paying a lot of money for great food, but these saucy balls don’t exactly hit those heights. [3] Imagine a non-lethal bazooka packed with finely chopped herbs. Now imagine firing that bazooka directly into your own face. That’s the impact of these insanely herby, fairly bready meatballs. The tomato sauce that they bathe in lacks some of the spicy intensity we like in a good shakshuka, but it’s nice overall. That said: the strips of toast that come with the dish tasted stale and chewy rather than crispy; we would’ve instead enjoyed some pieces of challah.

NEWBIE VS. CLASSIC VERDICT: Old-school shakshuka with eggs and challah trounce this State Fair variant, to say nothing of the value prospect.

Thirteen mickey-frickin’ dollars for a cup of ice and a quarter cup of viscous sweet liquid that is Elmer’s Glue-adjacent? Seriously? $13?

NEWBIE VS. CLASSIC VERDICT: Actual mango sticky rice all the way. Trying to render a beautifully balanced classic dessert in liquid format was a fool’s errand.

After a few minutes of our tasters riffing on this vegan spin on a classic pork bao, I had a realization: Other people were writing the review for me, and I should just put on my listening ears.

Here, in no particular order, are the various ways the taste and texture of these bao wrappers were described:

“Cardboard.”

“Styrofoam.”