Tens of thousands of San Antonians celebrated Diwali Saturday night at Hemisfair.
Diwali is the celebration of light over darkness, the victory of good over evil.
It’s full of music, dancing and a celebration of Indian culture.
But arguably, the star of Diwali might just be the food.
From north to south, just about every type of Indian cuisine was represented.
Dee Patel has worked a booth at Diwali for several years.
“We actually are a group of friends that share a passion of cooking. So far this is our 15th year at this festival, and every year, annually, we just come here to do what we love, which is cook," Patel said. "We change it up every year, but we always have our signature dishes, which are the tacos, paneer tacos and the chicken tacos."
"All of our spices come straight from India, specially grounded just for us. So we custom blend everything, and we make and prepare everything the morning of, and we happily serve all of our visitors that come through," Patel said. "And I'm out here just explaining everything to everyone. So we have a little bit of everything for everybody's flavor."
Visitors flocked to the food vendor area and ate it up, even if they weren’t sure what their food was called.
Leo Royzman came to sample the food and the culture.
“I mean, we came here to celebrate the culture, you know. So far, we just tried the food and we're gonna check out the rest of the showcase. We tried playing some drums. That was nice. And we saw the sand art, which was beautiful."
Kevin Woodson is vegan and managed to find something he could he eat, but also found out how spicy the food here can be.
“Well, I'm a vegan, which generally with Indian food, [eating it] is difficult, because they do like to put a lot of milk in everything. It actually is really good. But typical of Indian food, too, it is super spicy. I mean, you could probably tell I'm sweating.“
Woodson wasn’t the only person that broke out into a sweat. Isaac Quintanilla managed to find one of the spiciest dishes.
“Right now, it's kind of getting to me. I'm sweating right now, a sweat beading down my face, but so far so good. “
But he had a plan on what to do next.
“Once we get through this, we’ll probably get to the ice cream”
Crissy Crenwelge started off with a popular Indian Beer called Flying Horse before diving in to her meal.
“So I got masala dosa. It is amazing," she said. "They gave me, like, some different sauces with it, and so flavorful, and some great spice. And then I think we also got another dish that's called bhel [puri] ... and it's like a puffed rice. It's sweet and hot. It definitely tantalizes the tongue."
Daniel Franklin says not only is he is big fan of the food — biranya in particular — but he enjoys the music and dancing too.
“I think San Antonio is very lucky to have such a great event, absolutely perfect," Franklin said.
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of one of the attendees quoted. He was Daniel Franklin.
