Top chefs look to cook up deals at South Beach Wine & Food Festival

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 more than just a few meals.

The 23rd annual event, which runs Thursday through Sunday, brings together not only foodies but executives from the myriad of businesses that feed off the food industry.

“It’s kind of like the Super Bowl and spring break for chefs,” festival founder Lee Schrager told Side Dish.

“All of the agencies, book publishers and pots and pans companies come to make deals with chefs.”

Famed chef Todd English, who will return as a guest this year, remembered how his career was catapulted while taking part in one of the early festivals.

At the time, English was a rising star but little-known outside Boston where he had launched his restaurant, Olives. But a chance meeting with a representative for hotelier Barry Sternlicht led to English launching a restaurant at the St. Regis in Aspen, Colo.

The rest was culinary history.

“Deals can happen when you are socializing. People approach you — they like what you do and you exchange information,” English told Side Dish, adding that the festivals have evolved along with the food industry.

“Chefs are like musicians now,” he said. “There are so many musicians and songs, and there are more chefs than there ever were. … It’s very competitive.”

Another festival pioneer returning this year will be TV personality Rachael Ray, back for the first time since 2019.

It was Ray who came 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 thought, what if some of the world’s best chefs tried to do something so silly, and less fancy than what they usually 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 will be pushing her new branded made-in-New York liquor line, Staple Gin, which debuts in the spring.

Ray will hold a cooking demonstration to show how the gin can be used 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 changed over the past two decades. What started 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 different neighborhoods for more than 60,000 ticket holders.

The four-day gastronomic orgy will spill out from South Beach to Miami’s new trendy areas like the Design District and Coconut Grove.

New York’s restaurateurs are leading the charge, catering to the influx of pandemic transplants to open outposts like Carbone and more.

“When we started the festival, there were 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 in the Design District are selling out, and there’s a greenmarket event if you don’t want the beach, and we’ve created two new signature events in the Grove. There’s a whole world of people there,” Schrager said.

This year, there will be 500 chefs at the festival, hailing from as far as away as  New Zealand, Spain, France, Britain, Columbia and Peru, along with food influencers with “millions of followers,” at the Foodiecon event, Schrager added.