Miami’s booming restaurant scene takes center stage at this week’s South Beach Wine & Food Festival – where old favorites and up-and-coming chefs hope to cook up greater than just a couple of meals.
The twenty third annual event, which runs Thursday through Sunday, brings together not only foodies but executives from the myriad of companies that feed off the food industry.
“It’s type of just like the Super Bowl and spring break for chefs,” festival founder Lee Schrager told Side Dish.
“All the agencies, book publishers and pots and pans corporations come to make deals with chefs.”
Famed chef Todd English, who will return as a guest this yr, remembered how his profession was catapulted while participating in one among the early festivals.
On the time, English was a rising star but little-known outside Boston where he had launched his restaurant, Olives. But a probability meeting with a representative for hotelier Barry Sternlicht led to English launching a restaurant at the St. Regis in Aspen, Colo.
The remaining was culinary history.
“Deals can occur if you end up socializing. People approach you — they like what you do and also you exchange information,” English told Side Dish, adding that the festivals have evolved together with the food industry.
“Chefs are like musicians now,” he said. “There are such a lot of musicians and songs, and there are more chefs than there ever were. … It’s very competitive.”
One other festival pioneer returning this yr might be TV personality Rachael Ray, back for the primary time since 2019.
It was Ray who got here up with the festival’s signature event — its Thursday night “Burger Bash” — which is now so popular that there are scalpers for the event.
“I assumed, what if a few of the world’s best chefs tried to do something so silly, and fewer fancy than what they typically do — like just make a slider,” said Ray, whose daytime talk show, “Rachael Ray,” ended last May after 17 seasons.
Ray, who also has a pet food company, Nutrish, also launched the festival’s Yappie hour, for foodies and their pets.
This week, she might be pushing her recent branded made-in-Recent York liquor line, Staple Gin, which debuts within the spring.
Ray will hold a cooking demonstration to show how the gin will be utilized in recipes — like her “Dirty Martini Shrimp and Linguini” dish, which uses half a cup of Staple Gin, distilled in upstate Roscoe in partnership with Brian Facquet’s Do Good Spirits.
Despite the familiar faces, much has modified over the past 20 years. What began as a sleepy, laid-back festival with a barefoot-on-the-beach “bubbles and barbeque” vibe has morphed into giant tasting tents and events held in several neighborhoods for greater than 60,000 ticket holders.
The four-day gastronomic orgy will spill out from South Beach to Miami’s recent trendy areas just like the Design District and Coconut Grove.
Recent York’s restaurateurs are leading the charge, catering to the influx of pandemic transplants to open outposts like Carbone and more.
“Once we began the festival, there have been just two focal restaurants — Joe’s Stone Crab to the south and the Forge to the north and that was it,” said Schrager, chief communications officer for Southern Glazer Wine & Spirits, the world’s largest wine and spirits distributor.
“Our move to hold events within the Design District are selling out, and there’s a greenmarket event in the event you don’t want the beach, and we’ve created two recent signature events within the Grove. There’s a complete world of individuals there,” Schrager said.
This yr, there might be 500 chefs at the festival, hailing from so far as away as Recent Zealand, Spain, France, Britain, Columbia and Peru, together with food influencers with “hundreds of thousands of followers,” at the Foodiecon event, Schrager added.