What’s the name of that State Fair cheese curd stand again?

The neon sign inside the Food Building flashes a friendly animated rodent vaulting a cheese curd off a mouse trap, across the sign into the waiting mouth of a second mouse. What’s that stand called again?

Somehow the correct answer, Mouth Trap, is a surprise to many Minnesota State Fairgoers who swear it’s Mouse Trap.

There are memes and Reddit threads dedicated to the misremembering of its name, readers religiously write in to “correct” our spelling of Mouth Trap, and each year a new crop of fair fans discover they’ve failed this deep-fried reading comprehension test.

The situation could easily be attributed to the Mandela Effect, a favorite internet term used to describe the phenomenon where a large group of people have the same — but incorrect — memory. (It’s named after Nelson Mandela because many falsely recall him dying in prison in the 1980s; he died in 2013.) Famous examples include thinking Curious George has a tail or that Fruit Loops is the correct name of the cereal (it’s Froot Loops).

The confusion could also come from the sign, which features an active and neon-lit mouse trap, despite the very large letters M O U T H illuminated right there.

“I think it’s easy to confuse the two,” said Minnesota State Fair archivist Keri Huber. “A mouse trap is something we all know of as an actual item. With Mouse and Mouth being so similar and its surrounding visuals, it’s natural to think mouse.”

Even visual people, like St. Paul-based creative and photographer Katie Howie, can get it wrong. “For about four of my four decades, I thought it was this,” she said.

Dave Cavallaro wasn’t the first to sell fried cheese curds at the fair, but his vision for efficient line management made the Mouth Trap a State Fair standard. He, too, has heard all the wrong names for his pride and joy.

“We’ve been making cheese curds for 35 years,” Cavallaro said. Right up there with Sweet Martha’s and Pronto Pups, the battered and fried Ellsworth Creamery cheese curds are a fair classic. “Every year we hire a group of teenagers and a coach said to me this year, ‘We have more kids for you at the Moose Trap.’”

But he’s hardly holding the brain breakdowns against anyone: “Hey, I don’t care what people call it, as long as they come visit us.”

Cavallaro opened his stand inside the fair’s Food Building in 2002, after the iconic structure underwent a major renovation.

The historic space has been a gathering point for fair flavors since it was built in 1949 and known as the Food Show Building. It was home to a beer garden, the Food Show, dining halls and four corner concessions. After the reconstruction, Cavallaro’s stand was one of several new businesses to move in, but he wasn’t the first to sell the star attraction dish.

The Original Deep Fried Cheese Curds stand closed in 2017 amid a curd-adjacent controversy after founder Dick Mueller announced his retirement and his family wasn’t able to transfer the license as they had hoped.

Cavallaro was familiar with their operation, and its mouse holes, but his naming convention was pure inspiration. “I don’t know ... it kind of just popped into my head,” he recalled. “Cheese and mice or mouse ... I thought myself, the Mouth Trap! It’s a play on words.”

He then commissioned the neon sign, a self-described sucker for old school ways. He loves that even on the first day of business, they flipped those switches on and it had a sense of nostalgia.

“I like neon — I like tradition,” he said.

Which doesn’t mean he isn’t open to making changes. When the fair informed him that the neighboring kabob stand wasn’t returning for the 2025 season, he agreed to take over that square footage.

Every year, he said, he looks out at those winding lines outside the stand full of dedicated fans whose fair experience wouldn’t be complete without a basket of fresh fried cheese curds, and thinks, “Oh, geez! That’s a lot of people.”

And every year, a good number of those people look back at him and the legacy he’s built of batter and squeaky-fresh cheese bathed in hot oil and think “Hmm, Mouse Trap.”