Thousands of tickets to be distributed to students for World's Largest Pancake Breakfast
If you love to enjoy a good meal, you won't want to miss the World's Largest Pancake Breakfast that packs Main Street every year in Springfield. The family-friendly event kicks off Saturday, May 17, from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., and is expected to bring in thousands.
Best Mexican restaurants in western Massachusetts to celebrate Cinco De Mayo
'You get milk, coffee, juice, pancakes, bacon, and Little Bites,' said Judy Matt, President of the Spirit of Springfield. 'They actually gave us thousands of them.'
Tickets for the annual event are $3.00 for adults and $1.00 for children, and can be bought on the day of the event. On Monday, American Medical Response (AMR) and the Springfield Fire Commissioner picked up 70,000 tickets from the Spirit of Springfield's office and loaded them into their vehicles.
They plan to distribute them to schools across Hampden County, where all students will receive a free ticket to the breakfast.
'It's a great community event,' said Springfield Fire Commissioner B.J. Calvi. 'It's great to be a part of it, and being the Chair this year is going to be extra special.'
'It will be our job over the next few days to take all these envelopes and stop at the schools and spread the cheer of the tickets, so that everyone can come down and enjoy an incredible morning,' said Patrick Leonardo, Regional Director of AMR.
If you'd like to enjoy an unforgettable breakfast, all you have to do is head over to Main Street in Springfield on May 17.
WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on WWLP.com.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Eater
3 hours ago
- Eater
Mexican Asian Fusion Is One of North America's Signature Cuisines
In early 2009 in Los Angeles, there was no food experience more exciting than Roy Choi's Kogi truck. You'd wait in a long line in a dimly lit parking lot with a menagerie of trendy people, some of them drawn by the truck's latest Twitter post or Jonathan Gold's review in LA Weekly, others stumbling out of a nearby bar. Then you'd order too many tacos and stand next to your car to eat, perching your sagging paper trays of Korean Mexican fusion on the trunk. The truck felt new and surprising, and the big flavors demanded attention. The cheese oozing out the sides of the kimchi quesadilla rounded out the fermentation, while the salsa roja on top amplified the gochugaru. The blend of Korean and Mexican chiles in the salsa coaxed complementary flavors out of the punchy marinade on the kalbi. Funky one-off specials, like pork belly tteokbokki or the Kogi Hogi torta, constantly introduced new combinations. Leaning on the strengths of Mexican and Korean cuisines, Kogi probably would have worked if the food was only a novelty. But it also tasted definitively of Los Angeles. Choi (and his partner, Philippines-born, California-raised chef Mark Manguera) put many facets of his life into Kogi, including his training in fine dining, his rebellious spirit, and his Korean heritage, but most of all his experience growing up in LA, where Koreatown abuts several predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods. Choi's cooking prioritized innovation, but it still smacked of home. 'I think it became a voice for a certain part of Los Angeles and a certain part of immigration and a certain part of life that wasn't really out there in the universe. We all knew it, and we all grew up with it, and it was all around us, but the taco kind of pulled it together,' Choi told Terry Gross in a 2013 interview on Fresh Air. 'It was like a lint roller. It just kind of put everything onto one thing. And then when you ate it, it all of a sudden made sense, you know?' Kogi, parked in Venice, California, in 2010. Ted Soqui / Corbis / Getty Images Choi tapped into culinary histories that run deep in the American Southwest and California, where immigrants coming north from Mexico built lives alongside immigrants crossing the Pacific from Asia. (Kogi wasn't the first in the U.S. to serve food at this cultural intersection; spots like Avatar's, which has been serving Punjabi burritos in the Bay Area since 1989, are notable precursors.) But the truck marked a turning point for Mexican Asian fusion as an enduring cultural passion among interconnected communities. Over the last 16 years, Korean Mexican fusion has spread all over the country; in Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, bulgogi burritos now seem as natural as coffee and chili, respectively. A legion of chefs have also popularized all kinds of Asian Mexican fusion, serving birria ramen, halal carne asada, and furikake esquites. Years before the term 'chaos cooking' entered the conversation, these restaurants created cuisine that was fun and different, blending foods from distinct cultures in ways that make emotional sense, even when they sound far out on paper. And chefs keep finding new ways to capture how Mexican and Asian foods crisscross in the U.S. and in diners' hearts. Asian immigrants have been forming communities in Mexico, from the La Chinesca neighborhood of Mexicali to Mexico City's Pequeño Seúl, for decades or in some cases centuries. Chefs in these areas naturally adapted their cuisines to local ingredients and dishes; in the process, they started unpacking some of the natural affinities across cuisines that would grease the wheels of fusion projects well into the future. To Cesar Hernandez, associate restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and a street food aficionado, it makes sense that items like tacos and burritos became go-to formats for fusion cooking over the years. 'They truly are blank canvases for whatever. They play well with other flavors,' he says. Hernandez also points to the common ingredients that unite Asian and Mexican cuisines. 'A lot of these cuisines love citrus. A lot of these cuisines love chiles. And when you can coax those flavors out with the other cuisines, that's when it really works.' For Rhea Patel Michel of Mexican Indian fusion restaurant Saucy Chick in Pasadena, California, the connection between these foodways is elemental. Her background is Gujarati Indian, and her husband Marcel Rene Michel is Mexican American. In combining their cuisines, they found a natural synergy in ingredients like cumin, citrus, rice, and legumes, but they also discovered a connectivity of spirit. 'It's generous, it's vibrant, it's dynamic, and we were really energized by what it could look like,' to bring their food together, Patel Michel says. The Picoso Roll at the Sushi-lito food truck in Tucson. Nick Oza/Eater When chefs in historic Asian communities in Mexico couldn't get access to ingredients from back home, they often developed fusion dishes out of necessity. But the clearest progenitor for many contemporary projects might be Sinaloan sushi, created in Culiacán, Mexico, not out of necessity but creative conversation within the restaurant community. Japanese immigrants to the area, in Mexico's Sinaloa state, started opening sushi restaurants around the late 1980s, often hiring Mexican chefs. But it wasn't until those chefs left to open their own spots, bringing their own ideas and style to sushi — and building on recent sushi inventions from the north, like the California roll — that the genre really developed its modern personality. One foundational operation, Sushi-Lo, brought sushi out to the streets in a cart, and introduced the modern classic, deep-fried mar y tierra (surf and turf) roll filled with carne asada and shrimp. Today, Sinaloan spots both in Mexico and the U.S., like Culichi Town, tend towards extravagance, incorporating aguachile, plantain, beans, melted cheese, jalapeños, or Hot Cheeto dust. And the cuisine only went further when it jumped from Sinaloa to neighboring Sonoroa, edging its way toward the U.S. 'Sonoran-style specialists are more like sushi bars attached to a Wingstop,' writes Bill Esparza, 'with menus touting fried chicken wings and fried potatoes covered in melted cheese alongside the calorie-rich sushi.' Alongside Culichi Town — which has 12 locations in the U.S., including in Dallas and Las Vegas — Sonoran sushi can be found all over the American West, but it especially thrives in Tucson, alongside terroir-defying, cross-cultural icons like the bacon-wrapped Sonoran dog. Unlike contemporary fusion restaurants of the '80s and '90s that became reviled for carelessly throwing together half-assed hybrid dishes and wearing culture as costume, the impetus for Sinaloan and Sonoran sushi wasn't colonial. Even as chefs tended toward monchoso, a sort of thrilling overindulgence, their fusion remained rooted in mutual respect and open collaboration. Neither culture was being absorbed or assimilated, trod on or lifted over the other. 'Mexican food is not fucking precious,' Hernandez says. 'People in Mexico are the first to break the rules. It's part of the tradition.' Roy Choi at work at his latest project, Taco Por Vida, in 2024. Rebecca Roland/Eater That spirit has persisted in Kogi and the projects that followed, even as restaurants spread beyond the Southwest, more Asian cuisines entered the conversation, and chefs developed all kinds of fusion. Almost immediately following Choi's success, chef Bo Kwon created Koi Fusion in Portland, Oregon, in 2009, bringing Pacific Northwest style, a lighter touch on sauces, and an eye for local vegetables to the cuisine. In 2010, Señor Sisig launched as a Filipino Mexican food truck with sisig burritos and tacos, citing Kogi as major inspiration. That same year, the Korilla food truck in New York pushed rice bowls alongside tacos and burritos, drawing winding lines and mostly stellar reviews. Along the way through the many mid-2010s pivots at Mission Cantina in New York, chef Danny Bowien served Mexican kimchi, avocado sashimi, and a Chinese burrito special featuring mapo tofu or kung pao pastrami. More recently, Taqueria Azteca in New York rolled out phở birria, Phở Vy in Oakland, California, unveiled bò kho quesabirria tacos, and Baysian in nearby San Leandro whipped up Filipino queso-adobo. Back in LA, Holy Basil offers Thai-style prawn aguachile, while New York-born Baar Baar serves birria-influenced tacos with Kashmiri duck and tostadas with tuna bhel. Hernandez is especially excited about chef Sincere Justice's Tacos Sincero pop-up, born in Oakland in 2022. The chef draws on his experience growing up in LA's San Gabriel Valley (which has large Mexican and Asian American populations) to create eclectic dishes like a konbini-style egg salad tostada, calamansi tinga, and a saag burrito. '[Justice is] a real student of 'I want to try different shit and present it in these formats,' using tortillas and tostadas,' Hernandez says. 'He and a couple other folks are keeping that [multicultural cooking] alive.' All of it is constantly evolving, even within individual restaurants. At Saucy Chick, the Michels are always creating new dishes, like birria de chivo that incorporates masala spices, halal carne asada marinated in amchur and coriander, and esquites amped up with fenugreek and turmeric. Along the way, something surprising has happened during all this R and D. '[I've been] digging deep with my mom and my dad, [asking,] 'How do we make this dal?' or 'How do we make aloo?'' Rhea says. 'I've found myself getting even closer to my culture.' 'Kogi came at that right moment,' Choi told Mashed in 2020. In the midst of the Great Recession, the truck offered accessible, boundary-pushing cooking. 'People couldn't afford to go out all the time. People were struggling, lost their jobs, looking for what their next meal could be. And then this funny little beat-up truck came along, serving this delicious little taco.' The team's creativity and hustle helped them nail the tenor of the early social media era. During Twitter's ascendance, the Kogi team tweeted their locations and specials in real time as the truck rolled around town, drawing mobs of fans wherever they went. 'It felt like a scavenger hunt when we needed some sort of positive direction,' Choi told Mashed. Online appeal has remained an important piece of Mexican Asian fusion, clear in dishes like birria ramen (or 'birriamen'). Generally said to have been invented by chef Antonio de Livier at the Mexico City restaurant Animo, birriamen builds on the internet popularity of the Tijuana-style stewed beef dish. It might be made with instant noodles or higher-grade stuff, ramen broth or consomé, stuffed into tacos or piled onto vampiros — but in almost every case, it's big and bold and attention-grabbing, making it ideal for social media feeds. Aguachile at Holy Basil in LA Wonho Frank Lee/Eater But in other ways, Mexican Asian fusion no longer resembles Kogi's scrappy street food operation, especially when it starts climbing into fine dining territory. At Michelin-starred Los Félix in Miami, the tétela is filled with Japanese sweet potato, the esquites get a hit of basil furikake, there's miso-grilled corn with fish, and corn dumplings come with scallions and trout roe. Anajak Thai Cuisine's Thai Taco Tuesday, a pandemic-born lark, grew into a signature experience; dishes like a carnitas taco and a sashimi-style yellowtail tostada with nam jim-salsa negra marisquera topped with papaya salad powered the restaurant to national acclaim. Today, fusion dishes show up at restaurants that are nominally neither Mexican nor Asian. Birria dumplings appear on the ever-changing menu at San Francisco icon State Bird Provisions, while Chicago restaurant Mfk serves suzuki crudo on a tostada with both guacamole and sambal. This cuisine is everywhere now. It's not uncommon to see culinary combinations at an airport, the Taco Bell Test Kitchen, or floating up beneath the gaze of social media's Eye of Sauron. It has been in the mainstream for more than 20 years, practically forever in the modern food era, fully engrained into the way we eat. Alongside other types of third-culture cooking, Mexican Asian cuisine has largely shed the stigma that fusion picked up in the '90s. Chefs once chafed if their food was labeled fusion. Now, the pendulum has largely swung back. For Hernandez, it's a generational thing; the old distaste has fallen by the wayside as new chefs and new diners have come into maturity. 'Fusion' is just a convenient shorthand for what so many are doing: transforming culinary building blocks, wherever they come from, to create something new — and awesome — from the parts. Hernandez brings it back to a conversation with Justice of Tacos Sincero. As much as the chef's food reflects his upbringing, the specific labels just aren't important anymore. 'Whatever people want to call it, it doesn't matter,' Hernandez says. 'It just has to bang.'
The Verge
3 hours ago
- The Verge
A new war of the worlds is popping off in Invasion's third season.
Posted Aug 5, 2025 at 2:00 PM UTC A new war of the worlds is popping off in Invasion's third season. It took two seasons for Apple TV Plus' Invasion series to really start coming together and reveal what kind of extraterrestrial threat humanity was up against. But the new trailer for Invasion 's upcoming third season makes it feel like the show is going to be moving much more quickly as its human characters band together with a plan to take out the apex aliens' mothership. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Charles Pulliam-Moore Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Apple Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Streaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All TV Shows
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Video: Golden Retriever Reacts to His Furry Sister Having a Bad Dream
Golden Retrievers are one of the most caring breeds. This video is the perfect example of this. It shows how a golden fur baby comforts her sister who is having a bad dream. How the pooch cares for his sister during this time will surely melt your heart. Since the upload, the touching clip has fetched more than 45K likes at the time of writing. Instagram video shows a Golden Retriever comforting his sister who is having a bad dream This Golden Retriever sibling video will leave you emotional at the end. In the clip, uploaded on @gamjamypotato, the pet parent has captured a sweet gesture of the Golden Retriever brother for his furry sister, who was having a bad dream. The golden fur baby, Chip, was sitting outside the room when he heard the trembling voice of her sibling, Gamja, while she was asleep. Upon hearing the frightened voice, the pooch immediately walks into the room to check on his sister. He first does the 'scent check' to ensure she is 'fine,' before standing next to her for a few minutes. But despite being assured, Chip decides to 'sleep next to her' and immediately 'fall asleep' with his head resting on Gamja's face, signalling her that she is safe. Watching the love and affection of the Chip left the owner emotional. The pet parent was taken by 'the way he stood there making sure' his sister is 'okay.' The pup's action even left many netizens teary-eyed. They praised the pooch for being a best brother to his Golden Retriever sister and comforting her during a bad dream in the video. One user wrote, 'The best best siblings.' Another person mentioned, 'This is so sweet!Chippy is the best brother!' Another dog lover commented, 'Omg!!!!!!! I can't take this!!!!! Why would you have me bawling like this! They are truly soulmates! Chip is the goodest of baby boys.' The other pet lover said, 'The concern and attentiveness is very touching to watch – gorgeous.' The post Video: Golden Retriever Reacts to His Furry Sister Having a Bad Dream appeared first on DogTime. Solve the daily Crossword
