When the tents for the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival start going up in mid-May along Peachtree Street in Midtown, passers-by likely will have some idea of what to expect.
It will be a feed-a-thon like Taste of the Nation, with chefs handing out appetizing bites, right? Or it will be a forum for demonstrations and mingling with food celebrities, like the Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show. Or is it more akin to Taste of Atlanta — a ginormous street fair with sunshine and booze?
The answer to all that is “yes” — for a start. And just a start. The first Atlanta Food & Wine Festival — spanning four days (May 19-22) and crammed with programming — aims to be so much more. Such as?
“You want my 10-minute spiel?” jokes festival co-founder Dominique Love, who has been criss-crossing the country to raise awareness for the event, expected to bring thousands of visitors to the city. “This is a festival like no other — the first one in the United States that’s focused on the Southern region. We’re celebrating the culinary superstars of the region, capturing the traditions of the South and propelling them into the future.”
In other words, the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival is a big ol’ “howdy, y’all” to the greater food world.
Southern food, once dismissed as heavy and greasy, is now celebrated as America’s best exemplar of farm-to-table cooking. Southern chefs are counted among the country’s most innovative and forward thinking. And if there’s any place to put this all in perspective, it is here, the festival’s organizers say, the South’s great hub.
Love, a corporate events planner and consultant, claims the excitement about the festival and Atlanta as a food destination is palpable. “Living in the South, we have no idea how hot is it,” she says, adding with a laugh, “except from a climate perspective.”
‘Not just a trend’
Attendees may sweat a little, but they’ll have no shortage of events — both educational and sybaritic — to attend. The sprawling setup will spill from tents to conference rooms and ballrooms at the Loews Hotel, to local restaurants and private homes, to the Margaret Mitchell House and to an outdoor street cart pavilion.
Love and co-founder Elizabeth Feichter enlisted 65 of the top chefs and sommeliers from Washington, D.C., to Texas to form a “Founders Council” and devise the programming themselves. Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene will break down a whole hog. Miller Union’s Steven Satterfield will host an interactive demonstration on “putting up” seasonal fruits and vegetables (attendees will take home their efforts). Cacao’s Kristen Hard will taste single-origin chocolates and cocoa beans with a chocolate-bourbon cocktail. Duane Nutter of One Flew South will lead a seminar about the dearth of black chefs in restaurant kitchens.
One event track called “Imports & Inspirations” will explore other “southern” foods and spirits — from southern France, southern Europe, the southern hemisphere. Thankful sommeliers get to lead Chateauneuf-du-Pape tastings as a result.
That said, festival attendees will likely pony up the not-inconsiderable ticket prices (see accompanying story) to explore the tastes of our South, such as whole hog barbecue prepared by Woodfire Grill’s Kevin Gillespie. People around the country have a hunger for all things Southern that those of us who live here can’t quite comprehend.
“People are referring to [this fascination with Southern food] as a trend,” says cookbook author Ted Lee who, with his brother Matt, will be leading a grind-your-own-grits demonstration that he promises will be “corn-tastic.”
“But it’s not just a trend,” says Lee, who is currently working on a Charleston cookbook. “It’s a completely natural progression of the entire country’s interest in ingredients and sources, and where food comes from.
“Anywhere in America you’re going to cotton to the South, because the stories here are so interesting and diverse. There are people who are taking Southern food in futurist directions, and there are people who are trying to restore the cuisine.”
Kim Severson, a New York Times journalist who left food writing to become the paper’s Atlanta bureau chief, has noticed “an attraction to Southern food that’s happening in a lot of places.” Not only is it the strong farm-to-table ethos that informs Southern cooking, she argues, but also the way Southerners eat.
“There’s an intimacy about the Southern table that doesn’t happen anywhere else, and a feeling of cultural exchange,” she says.
That’s precisely the theme festival founder Love sounds when she travels around to drum up interest in the festival, which is sponsored by Food & Wine and Travel + Leisure magazines. “There is this magic that exists in the South, where you do pause to eat the food that comes from the backyard.”
Beyond farm-to-table
But is Atlanta, a city of highways and every fast-food drive-through known to man, the best venue to make this point?
“Absolutely,” says Kat Kinsman, managing editor of CNN’s food and dining blog, Eatocracy. Kinsman’s job takes her to restaurants all over the country, but she sees something different here.
“We hear ‘farm-to-table’ from every city, but Atlanta means it in a more passionate way than any other city in the country,” Kinsman says, citing the unusually strong bond between local growers and chefs. Chefs encourage farmers here to grow heirloom varieties of corn and field peas because they tell the story of the South.
“Atlanta is more vibrant than any other city in the South,” says Lee. He says the region’s immigrant influx introduces Atlantans to a “wealth and variety of soulful and soul-stirring cuisines.” Because this is a city where diners turn from “the hippest, hottest thing” to great Asian and South American restaurants, it has a more developed dining culture.
That said, Love admits an Atlanta-based festival was a hard sell when she first went looking for sponsors.
“Could Atlanta really be sophisticated enough to host a national culinary weekend? That was the question at first,” she recalls. “Some people pooh-poohed us.”
But from the start, she drew a clear distinction from the region’s other major food event, the BB&T Charleston Wine + Food Festival, which occurs in March.
“Charleston is more about the destination of Charleston, which is fabulous and beautiful,” Love says, adding that a lot of big names from New York are the headliners there. “Our weekend is more thematic and more focused on the South.”
Love says she is on target with her ticket sales and her projection of attracting more than a third of attendees from outside Atlanta. So far, buyers from 17 states outside Georgia and four foreign nations account for 34 percent of sales. Her hunch — that the country was hungry for a big Southern food showcase — is proving to be a good one.
“It’s time to start showcasing the South,” she says, “and Atlanta is the best backdrop. This is the hub. This is the portal to the South. This is the reflection of old and new.”
