Eating Our Hearts Out At Tifton Rhythm & Ribs BBQ Festival

After leaving Augusta, we drove south for about four hours as we’d booked a cabin in Nashville (the Nashville in Georgia, not the Tennessee one!)

We’d found the cabin on Airbnb and it was even nicer than expected. There was a working fireplace, so we picked up some wood on our way to enjoy that in the evenings. The master bathroom had a jetted tub and there was a great porch overlooking the cabin’s large, private pond.

It got better though. There was a canoe by the pond that guests could use, so Shae and I grabbed a glass of wine and headed out on the water.

We brought Truffles along for the ride so that she could have her first ever trip in a canoe. Given that she’s not always the biggest fan of water, she seemed pretty content out on the pond.

The owners of the cabin had a binder containing all kinds of information about the area, including a calendar of events throughout the year.

While flicking through that, we noticed that the nearby city of Tifton was having an event the weekend we were staying in Nashville – the Tifton Rhythm & Ribs BBQ Festival. We like our food, so on Saturday March 3 we went off to Tifton.

We’d figured the Tifton Rhythm & Ribs BBQ Festival would be in a small park with maybe a couple of dozen stalls offering BBQ and ribs.

Nope.

The festival was huge. It’s held in Fulwood Park which turned out to be a 28 acre park with seemingly every square inch being used.

There were all kinds of non-food stalls…

…water zorbing…

…and even ziplining.

Shae and I weren’t there for the activities though – we wanted food! It was incredibly tough knowing where to eat though as there were tons of food places.

We walked around the entire park to make sure we weren’t going to miss out on anything amazing. The first place we decided to get some food was at Doc & Artie’s.

Shae got one of the smoked beef brisket tacos seeing as it came with cilantro avocado cream sauce, while I ordered one of the pulled pork tacos as I liked the sound of the sweet garlic glaze.

To be honest, we were both a little disappointed with our tacos. There wasn’t much to them and they definitely weren’t worth $5 each.

We’d spotted some intriguing options at a different stall on our way round, so we headed back over there.

Yep, they were offering alligator kabobs and fluffy fries. We’d not heard of fluffy fries before, but it turned out that we’d had them before when we lived in Thailand (they weren’t called that there.)

They’re effectively spiralized potatoes that are deep fried for a couple of minutes. Shae and I got a serving to share, along with gator on a stick.

The fries were great and it was a much larger portion than we’d been expecting. The gator on a stick was tastier than we thought it’d be too – it was like a slightly chewier version of chicken.

Shae and I weren’t the only ones interested in trying it…

Because of how filling the fluffy fries and gator were, we didn’t have room for much more food. Seeing as the purpose of the festival was BBQ ribs, we knew we had to try some of those. Thankfully, right next to the stall selling the fluffy fries was Babe’s BBQ with their first place award winning ribs.

They had all kinds of tasty looking food, but we went for a serving of ribs which only cost a couple of bucks. They were excellent – great flavor, incredibly tender and the meat fell off the bone.

They also got the Truffles seal of approval.

Final Thoughts

We only spent a couple of hours at the Tifton Rhythm & Ribs BBQ Festival but are glad we visited. It was a great event with tasty food, live music throughout the day and night and fun for people of all ages.

If you find yourself in south Georgia in early March, you should add this festival to your list of things to do.