Ted Santarella, who runs Tarrant's restaurant at 1 W. Broad St., said he had to return to his restaurant four times Sunday to get she-crab soup and pizza for a crowd that exceeded expectations.

"It was unbelievable," Santarella said of the first -- but not the last -- edition of Broad Appétit, the latest food festival in Richmond.

Kathy Emerson of the Downtown Neighborhood Association, who helped plan the first festival, said organizers have already begun planning for next year's event.

"We have to get more chefs," she said. "We ran out of food, and it was raining!"

Mixing art with food, the organizers blocked off a four-block area of West Broad Street between Adams and Monroe streets, set up canopies for more than 25 restaurateurs, brought in two beer trucks, provided entertainment -- and the people came.

Emerson said the purpose, to showcase during daylight hours some of the improvements to the downtown area, more than succeeded.

"We noticed lots of people from the suburbs," she said. "We were just blown away."

She estimated that more than 5,000 people attended the event.

And while acknowledging that the once-blighted area along West Broad still has empty storefronts, Emerson said she hopes the improvements -- the quirky art shops, restaurants and the like -- will offer enough of an attraction to draw people back downtown.

"We didn't know how it would work out; it was a real crap shoot," said Scott Garnett, one of the organizers and owner of Lift Coffee Shop & Café on West Broad.

He described the turnout as "kind of a large First Friday crowd." First Friday is the nighttime pub crawl and art walk that has helped revitalize the area.

Along with the food, the art sold out. In a "whodunit" theme borrowed from the English, artists from Richmond and other states prepared 80 6-by-9-inch paintings and put their names on the back so people could not know who the artist was.

Broad Appétit joins several food festivals that have sprung up in the Richmond area in recent years.

"There is no such thing as too much food," Emerson said.
Contact Tyler Whitley at (804) 649-6780 or twhitley@timesdispatch.com.