Garlic fries are hitting Gourmet Alley this year, joining dozens of other pungent selections thanks to alley chairsmen Alan Heinzen and Ken Fry, who cooked up the recipe with the help of willing taste-testers. The chairs substituted their recipe after the Gordon Biersch Brewing Company passed on being a vendor - the first time it's done so in four years. Festival volunteers will be able to enjoy the fries this year: For the first time, volunteers will feast in Gourmet Alley, instead of eating at a separate hospitality tent, which has been eliminated.

The new food is only one of many additions to this year's festival: Organizers are also introducing country band Whiskey Falls Saturday, July 28, and relocating the children's play area to the center of Christmas Hill Park close to Gourmet Alley. Headliner Whiskey Falls features four singer-songwriters who joined forces to create a harmonizing Western sound band member Seven Williams calls "Hotel California meets Sweet Home Alabama."

A brand-new event will pit professional chefs against one another, battling at the grills to win $5,000 and a 1,000-pound haul of Gilroy's stinking rose.

The contest, dubbed Garlic Showdown, sprung from the 28-year-old Great Garlic Cook-Off, which pits amateur cooks against each other for the best garlic-flavored dish.

In the Showdown, professionals will take the stage in a contest modeled on the "Iron Chef" TV show of Food Network fame, at noon Sunday, July 29.

Four cooks, selected by four different Northern California radio stations, will get a surprise "secret ingredient," then spend two hours folding that foodstuff into garlicky entrees for judges' review.

The festival is also bringing back the Garlic Idol singing competition, which carries a prize of 1,000 gallons of unleaded gas, the cooking demonstration stage, which reveals the secrets behind Gourmet Alley favorites, and the Got Milk Gravity Tour, a skateboarders' stunt show returning to the festival after a two-year hiatus.