With festivals growing bigger, and the local festival calendar getting more crowded, there was something refreshingly different about the debut last year of the Muffuletta Festival in Old Metairie. On paper, it seemed to follow the standard recipe for a New Orleans food festival: start with a familiar dish, bank on its built-in name recognition and round up some restaurants and vendors to riff on it.

But the way Muffuletta Festival came together, it felt more like a street fair or a saint’s feast day. It returns next Sunday (Oct. 7) in the same format. Rather than a park, this event is held on the street between Nor-Joe Imports, the Italian deli that started it, and the railroad tracks running through its neighborhood.