Abel Gonzales Jr. is East Dallas, and not in the way people say that about a neighborhood they moved to. Born in Dallas, raised on the east side, and never left. Fair Park sat close enough that the State Fair of Texas was not an annual outing so much as a season the family lived through together, first with his grandparents and parents, every year without a skip.
His father ran a restaurant, which in practice meant a man who worked constantly and rarely stopped for anything. The fair was the exception. That combination, a kitchen at home and a fairground down the road, is most of the explanation for how the rest of this went.
“Growing up we had food we wanted at the fair, but I am always conscious that as a family we had to share and we were on a budget,” Gonzales said.
He became a concessionaire in 2002 and opened his first booth in 2003, selling Texas-shaped sopapillas. The first years were hard. Then in 2005 the fair launched the Big Tex Choice Awards, a competition open only to concessionaires, and the theme of that year’s fair included an Elvis exhibit. Gonzales went looking for something Elvis would have eaten and landed on a deep-fried peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwich. He won. First contest, first winner, and the first Hispanic winner in the award’s history.
The next year he did the thing that made him internationally famous. Fried Coke took Most Creative in 2006 and sold ten thousand cups in its first two weeks. Within a year it had turned up at something like 47 state fairs around the country. He has never really been allowed to stop answering questions about it.
Then came fried cookie dough. Then fried butter in 2009, whipped and frozen into balls and dropped in the fryer, sold in plain, garlic, grape and cherry, and moved 35,000 of them. David Letterman built a Top Ten list around it. Oprah’s people came to the booth. Five Big Tex Choice Awards in all, the fifth for fried jambalaya, and somewhere in there the nickname stuck: Fried Jesus.
The list of things he has put in oil beyond the winners runs long. Deep-fried turkey ribs were a hard item to develop and a hard one to make.
“But they were delicious, and they remind you of Thanksgiving,” Gonzales said.
“We try not to be too gimmicky with the ideas, but some things work, and you can just feel it before it is introduced.”
The item that says the most about where he sits now is the deep-fried lobster, which he created in 2015 and still sells. It is the most expensive thing at the fair, and rather than hold the price he added more to an already beautiful plate. That backfired just a bit. He is candid that fair food has gotten expensive and that people are right to say so, which is why he also runs a three or four dollar hot dog at another stand. Both of those are his, and he talks about the pairing as the whole point rather than a contradiction. This year he is making a deliberate push toward affordability and hopes to take the lead in that direction.
“There are a lot of components to a good fair year, weather, economy, and we do everything in a set amount of days to make that go well for everyone,” he said.
His stand on Nimitz has carried the fried PB&J and the fried cookie dough year after year, which is its own kind of statement in a competition built on novelty. Twenty-three years after that first booth, the man who started with sopapillas is the reason a whole category exists, and the reason a dozen other concessionaires spend their summers thinking about what to fry next.
His own favorite thing to eat out there is not fried at all. It is the turkey leg, and as the days get closer he can already taste the one from Smokey John’s.
He still goes to the fair the way his parents took him. That has not changed. He just has 64 employees with him now.
If you want to see the operation rather than read about it, the fair years have been on television twice. Gonzales judged the fried-food competition series Deep Fry Masters starting in 2014, and he is one of the concessionaires at the center of Deep Fried Dynasty, the A&E series filmed at the 2021 fair and aired in spring 2022. Episodes follow him through a manager’s kitchen accident, a bee invasion that cuts into sales, a quality-control problem with the fried butter, and one stretch where Smokey John’s brings him in to help move a new item. Neither show is in production now, and the A&E episodes are still available to stream.
