Potterville and the Gizzard Fest

Every small town has something it’s known for, and for Potterville — a little city tucked into the farm country southwest of Lansing — that something is a deep-fried chicken gizzard. Each June, the town throws Gizzard Fest, a three-day summer festival built, improbably and proudly, around the humble gizzard.

The festival grew out of an older “Potterville Days” celebration back in the 1990s, when the local chamber went looking for a catchier hook and landed on the town’s most famous restaurant, Joe’s Gizzard City, a Main Street fixture since 1960. The name stuck. Today thousands of people pour in from around the region for a weekend of small-town fun: a parade, a carnival, a car show, live music, fireworks — and, for the brave, a gizzard-eating contest, where the first person to put away two pounds of fried gizzards takes the prize. Whether or not you try the main attraction, it’s a genuinely good time.

Gizzard Fest runs over a weekend in early June each year; the schedule is posted at gizzardfest.org.