Addison Seeks Alternatives After Taste Festival Canceled

Taste Addison is dead after 30 years. The town pulled the plug on its signature spring food festival following a net loss of more than $700,000 in the event’s final year.

The three-day festival had been booked for April 17 through 19 at Addison Circle Park. It won’t happen. Instead, city staff is now working to redirect funding toward smaller, year-round programming built around the town’s 200-plus restaurants.

The Addison City Council made that call after reviewing the 2025 festival’s financials. The numbers weren’t close. Officials concluded Addison was spending far more than it was getting back. Supporters pushed back in January, arguing that the $700,000 shortfall was really a marketing expense, that social media reach and online platform performance had real value. The council didn’t buy it.

Councilman Howard Freed didn’t mince words about what he saw as the core problem: national headlining acts that cost serious money and drew crowds made up mostly of locals who weren’t booking hotel rooms or spending big at the restaurants the festival was supposed to benefit. “I think we should have a restaurant week and not one night, but a whole week,” Freed said during council discussions. “I don’t care to line the pockets of these headliners. That’s not who I’m trying to help. I wanna help the restaurants. So I want to spend our money advertising the restaurants and getting people into the restaurants. And I think the event doesn’t work.”

That’s about as plain as it gets.

Freed’s logic is hard to argue with. If you’re spending $700,000 and drawing a crowd that’s already local, you’ve built a nice party for your own residents. That’s not economic development. The three-day outdoor footprint, the staging, the national talent, the full logistics load of a festival that size: none of it pencils out if attendees aren’t sleeping in your hotels or discovering restaurants they didn’t already know.

Taste Addison had been running since the mid-1990s, an annual spring tradition at Addison Circle Park featuring live music and local food vendors rotating through each year. For a long stretch, it worked. It doesn’t anymore, and the council’s decision reflects a straightforward read of the financials rather than any sentiment about the event’s history.

Deputy Mayor Pro Tempore Chris DeFrancisco laid out what comes next. The plan isn’t to abandon what Taste Addison represented. It’s to spread it out. “I think we can do Taste Addison throughout the year,” DeFrancisco told the council. “I think we can do a very creative restaurant week in a way that only Addison could do that’ll generate just as much buzz, or views, or TV highlights. I don’t know what you want to call that, but I also think we can break it down and target some things that we’ve been trying to figure out how to grow. So spread the whole tasting out all year and get maybe just as much if not more exposure.”

Festival organizers confirmed the shift in a statement, saying staff had been directed to find new ways to support the restaurant community beyond a single weekend. “Staff has been asked to identify opportunities to promote Addison’s more than 200 restaurants in ways that extend throughout the year rather than focusing on a single weekend event,” the statement, covered by NBC DFW, said.

For readers in Preston Hollow and across Park Cities and North Texas who made the trip to Addison each April, the festival is gone. What replaces it is still being designed. Whether a distributed restaurant week can generate the same regional pull as a three-day event with national acts is a real question, and the council acknowledges it doesn’t have all the answers yet. What it does have is a $700,000 reason not to run the same play again.