Drive past 3801 Glade Rd on a normal Sunday and St. Mary's Romanian Orthodox Church looks like what it is: a modest brick sanctuary with a gravel overflow lot and a sign that changes with the liturgical calendar. Drive past it the last weekend of October and you'll find traffic cones, shuttle signage, and a line of cars that stretches past the church's own property line into two separate school parking lots in two separate cities. That gap between the ordinary Tuesday version of this address and the late-October version is the whole story.
This year the Romanian Food Festival DFW turns 20. The festival's own event page lists it as the "20th Anniversary Edition," running from 6 p.m. Friday, October 23 through 6 p.m. Sunday, October 25, 2026. For most of its run, the festival has landed on the weekend closest to Halloween. Last year's event ran October 31 through November 2. This year it moved about a week earlier, off the holiday weekend for what appears to be the first time in recent memory. Milestone years tend to come with small logistical resets like that, and this one is worth marking on the calendar precisely because the date isn't where residents expect it.
A festival older than everything else on Colleyville's calendar right now
Twenty years puts the first Romanian Food Festival somewhere around 2006, which predates the current wave of attention on Colleyville: the new Heroes Park that opened this June, the restaurant turnover along Colleyville Boulevard, the Acuff Lane development still working through city council. Those are the things getting written about right now because they're new. St. Mary's festival isn't new. It's the thing that's been running quietly in the background the entire time everything else was still farmland, strip retail, or somebody else's plan.
That longevity matters because it explains the scale problem the festival now has to solve every year: how do you park several thousand people for a three-day event at a church built for Sunday services, not a festival crowd.
The parking map spans two cities
The festival's answer is to borrow parking from public schools, and it borrows from more than one. According to the event's own listing, free parking is available at two locations, with directional signage posted as guests approach.
| Parking Lot | Address | City |
|---|---|---|
| Colleyville Heritage High School | 5401 Heritage Ave | Colleyville |
| Heritage Elementary School | 4500 Heritage Ave | Grapevine |
A single church parking lot needing overflow from its own high school is a familiar small-town pattern. Needing a second lot in a neighboring city, at an elementary school four blocks away, is not. That's not a fact about Romanian food. It's a fact about attendance, and it tells you the festival draws well past its own congregation and well past Colleyville's own borders.
What's actually on the table
The menu hasn't chased trends, and that's part of the draw for people who return year after year. Long-running coverage of the festival lists the same core dishes:
- Sarmale, the traditional stuffed cabbage rolls
- Mici, grilled skinless sausage
- Polenta served with feta cheese and sour cream
- Romanian doughnuts and pastry
- Beer and wine
None of that requires translation for a first-time visitor, and none of it is the kind of festival food that shows up at every other event on the DFW calendar this fall. If you've eaten your way through GrapeFest's wine tents or a Restaurant Week tasting menu, this is a different register entirely: home recipes served at church-festival scale, not a chef's interpretation of them.
The part you can join instead of just watch
The food draws the line at the door, but the entertainment is built around participation, not observation. The festival's published schedule includes a folk dance performance by a group called Tricolorii Veseli Juniori, and the performance is structured to end with an audience invitation into a traditional Hora, the circle dance that anchors Romanian celebration. Live music runs alongside it. A guided tour of the church itself is also part of the weekend, for anyone who wants context on the building before or after the food line.
This is the detail that separates a food festival from a cultural one. You're not just handed a plate and pointed toward a folding table. You're invited into the dance by the time the folk group finishes its set.
Pairing it with a quieter morning
If a weekend built around church-lot traffic and festival crowds isn't your speed for the whole three days, Colleyville has a genuinely different pace within a few minutes of Glade Road. The Colleyville Nature Center, run by the city's Parks and Recreation department, covers 46 acres with nine ponds and 3.5 miles of multi-use trails, along with a pavilion, fishing pier, and playground. Dogs are welcome on a leash. The trail loop is flat and shaded, which makes it a reasonable way to spend a Saturday morning before heading over to the festival in the afternoon rather than arriving to a packed lot at peak hours.
That's not a stretch pairing. It's the same weekend, the same part of town, and two ends of what Colleyville actually offers: a festival built on twenty years of tradition and a nature preserve built for the kind of quiet that a festival crowd doesn't have.
What to actually do with this
If you're planning to go, treat the earlier date as the headline. Residents who've attended in past years and mentally filed this as a Halloween-weekend fixture will want to double check the calendar, because October 23 to 25 is not October 31 to November 2. Plan to park at Colleyville Heritage High School if you're coming from inside Colleyville, or Heritage Elementary if you're coming up from Grapevine, and expect a shuttle rather than a direct walk from your car to the gate. Kids 12 and under get in free. Everyone else needs a general admission ticket, available through the festival's own event page.
Twenty years is long enough that most of what's currently drawing attention in Colleyville wasn't here yet when this festival started. That's worth knowing the next time someone tells you what Colleyville's biggest annual event is.
If you're weighing a move to Colleyville and want the neighborhood rundown that goes beyond the festival circuit, from schools to street-level detail, Nathan Karns is glad to walk through it with you.
