Miami Food Blog

​Tickets for the 2010 Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival go on sale this coming Monday, October 26. The festival is scheduled for February 25 to 28, and unlike past years there will not be a second block of tickets sold in early 2010. So Monday is, like, the day to buy.

A complete lineup of events for the festival is available here, but what follows is a taste of this year's highlights:

Amstel Light Burger Bash presented by Allen Brothers and hosted by Rachael Ray.  

Wine Spectator's Best of the Best, sponsored by the hoodlums at Bank of America with money they stole from you, returns to the Fontainebleau Miami Beach.

Perrier-Jouët BubbleQ hosted by Emeril Lagasse and Friends, "the Festival's perfect pairing of champagne and barbeque". (Bonus tip discovered in years past; If your hands get sticky from the BBQ, Perrier-Jouët on paper towel works as well as a Wet-Nap.)

South Beach Wine & Food founder and director Lee Schrager.

What began in 1996 as an annual one-day food and wine "extravaganza" hosted at Florida International University's Biscayne Bay Campus has morphed into a four-day culinary power summit on the sands of sexy South Beach. The man behind the South Beach Wine and Food Festival is founder and director Lee Schrager, who hatched the idea in 2002 for Southern Wines & Spirits.

"I never dreamt [the festival] would get this big, but I'm not surprised," he explains. "I try to clone myself during Festival time -- it doesn't work. I mainly look forward to thanking as many sponsors, chefs, etc. in person as I can. "

Holleman's Restaurant of Miami Springs @ Food & Wine from Miami New Times on Vimeo.

Holleman's Restaurant of Miami Springs was representing at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in a big way. They brought 7,000 portions of their Black Angus aged New York strip topped with cippolini onions grilled and marinated in a fig puree. Holleman's is something of a landmark; with more than 25 years in the game, they're about as official as you can get in the restaurant business. Short Order supports local talent and salutes those who've made their mark. Hungry? Go to Holleman's.

Click Here for the Holleman's Restaurant Website 

Last night, Obama's State of the Union address featured a lot of talk about energy this, renewable that, and let's face it, he's right. Matter of fact, if we don't start fishing our waters in a more responsible, future-conscious manner,  the only chicken of the sea left is gonna be agoraphobic pirates.

That's where Clean Seas comes in. Its goal is to close the life cycle of Southern bluefin tuna. What's that mean? A captive-bred microsystem of renewable fish stock could help eliminate the strain of wild catch on our planet's resources. Listen as company representative Chris Johnson speaks about the importance of this endeavor and its foreseeable impact on the fish industry and global food culture.

Click here for the Clean Seas website for a closer look at what they do.

Hakkasan booth at Best of the Best

Michael Moran, culinary director and chef/instructor at the FIU School of Hospitality, along with his small army of FIU student/volunteers, were able to recover more than 800 meals from events at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival and have donated them to the Daily Food Bank. The meals, culled from Bubble Q, Burger Bash, and Grand Tasting demos, represent twice what the students were able to salvage last year.

I was wandering around the Wines of Spain Pavilion at the South Beach Food & Wine Festival when I saw the Forever Cheese sign. Nice name, I thought as I speared a couple of cubes with a toothpick. The cheese tasted expensive, not like the stuff I get at the gas station.

The South Beach Food & Wine Festival offered more than cheese trays and grape juice. What are we talkin' 'bout? Booze, glorious booze, and there was plenty of it. I saw brandy, absinthe, vodka, tequila... it was like that scene in The Warriors where every gang in the city shows up for the big meeting, except with liquor companies, on South Beach, and nobody got shot. Awesome. I got two videos to give you an idea of the liquored-up vibe in the place.

Whitney Roux

Product Placement at its finest.

"You have to respect your ingredients. You have to respect the food." This according to Top Chef Ilan Hall is the recipe for success. Other advice to amateur foodies included the typical "start at the bottom, even if it means peeling garlic." And then keep a clean workspace. However his brief answer left me wondering what does it take to be a top chef?

I heard the sound of an excited crowd and saw Paula Deen get introduced onstage at Sunday's South Beach Wine and Food Fest. In a tent at 13th and Ocean, I maneuvered  close for an angle to shoot video.

Paula Deen is a funny lady. I don't own a TV and I'm not familiar with her work, but she had me laughing off rip. She started talking about her loose pants and showed the crowd how they kept falling. Then, as she was walking across the stage, they slipped straight off her hips and went down to mid-thigh before she caught 'em, tugged 'em back up, and possibly got a wireless mic receiver stuck up her ass (watch the video).

Chef Dean James Max of 3030 Ocean in Fort Lauderdale had a table set up at the Food & Wine Festival serving the best grub I tried in the whole place. I didn't know what the hell it was, so I waited around till Chef was done schmoozing his many fans and asked him about it. I still don't know how they did what they did with what they were serving, but maybe you do. Anyway, I don't care, it involved fresh, local fish, and it was great.

If Sunday was any indication of how well the South Beach Wine & Food Festival did, then it was a resounding success. Tons of humans tore through hundreds of thousands of portions of grub and massive amounts of alcohol, grape-based and otherwise. Celebrity chefs led cooking demos, signed books, worked events throughout the city, and reveled in their rock-star status. But the real stars of the show were the FIU students who made it all happen. From logistics to execution, the FIU kids involved with the event were an integral, unpaid element to the success of the event. Here are two of their stories...

Saturday and Sunday marked the South Beach Wine & Food Fest's premier event, the Grand Tasting Village, which cordoned off a huge strip of South Beach the size of three or four football fields and filled it with hundreds of restaurants, distributors, wine vendors, and wineries, all flinging so much free product you'd think it was Silicon Valley in 1997. For just $213 a ticket (yikes) folks could come in and sample from local restaurant fare, drink dozens of classes of wine, or watch celeb chefs like Emeril and Rachel Ray do live food demos. The chef stuff I could care less about personally - I was there for the tasting village. I wanted to gorge myself and gorge well. And here's what I found.

We're referring to Mario Batali being "up there" on stage at the SBWFF's Wines and Food of Spain dinner. You've probably heard that he dropped a couple of F-bombs in front of the royal company. And speaking of F-bombs: What the fuck was he even doing on that platform welcoming the King and Queen of Spain to our city? We've got more than enough great chefs that could have done so, and in the process given Miami's culinary scene a boost. It is nothing less than a slap in the face to our local culinarians that an out-of-towner was selected for this honor.

Alvaro Beade from Valladolid, Spain, the chef at Ideas Restaurant in Coconut Grove would have been a fine choice, but so would Philippe Ruiz, Pascal Oudin, Edgar Leal, Doug Rodriguez or any number of our talented toques. And I bet they could have handled the proceedings without having to use the word fuckwads.

The problem is that ever since the Food Network took over, the Festival has not been about locals. If the SBWFF folks are intent on having Mario Batali and the Food Network buffoons represent our city, then instead of inviting Manny Diaz and Charlie Crist to attend the dinners, they might as well fly in former Governor Blagojevich to do so at next year's ceremonies instead. His language, we're sure, would pair well with Batali's.

Friday's Trade Tasting event at the Grand Tasting Village on the Beach brought out salespeople, restaurateurs, and a barrage of folks tenuously tied to the food and wine industry -- a frolicking fellowship of flaks, frauds, food bloggers, and so forth.

There was no shortage of beverages -- coffee drinks, cocktails, beer, water, and of course wines, among which my favorite sampled was a 2005 Cosentino Winery Meritage called The Poet. Then again, it's possible that I was somewhat intoxicated by the name.

As for food -- very slim pickings. Marky's Caviar was spooning their namesake product and slicing beautifully marbled wisps of Iberian ham culled from the renowned pata negra; that was a hit. Lesters Deli from Montreal offered tastes of their famous smoked meat sandwich -- a hot, corned-beef cut with mustard on rye. Very, very tasty.

But the big line formed at the Plugra corner, where chef Dewey LoSasso of North One 10 was handing out an herb pretzel topped with smoked salmon and a Plugra caviar compound butter; a highfalutin' take on bagel and cream cheese. I asked Dewey if he happened to have any creamed herring to go along with it. "That's my wife Dale's thing", he said with a chuckle. "Look at my name" he continued, pointing to the stitching on his chef jacket and enunciating the syllables: "LO-SAS-SO". I was about to note the parsimonious portions of rich, delicious brioche bread pudding with Plugra vanilla butter sauce that Dewey and his crew were also handing out, but thought better of it. Instead I got back into line and nabbed a second helping.

Inveterate radio jocks Paul Castronovo and Ron Brewer of Big 105.9 and 97.9 got all up in the SoBe Wine & Food Fest's businazz this morning, hosting an Iron Chef style cooking challenge live from the Fontainebleau (holy crap, did I spell that correctly?). The pair tested their cooking skills against each other in front of a slew of actual chefs and food glitterati -- peeps like Emeril Lagasse, Gail Simmons, Michelle Bernstein, and major-fucking-tool Guy Fieri. Most of the cooking seemed to be done by FIU culinary students - at least on Young Ron's side - but the two radio hosts actually pulled out some decent dishes. 

Ron did grouper sliders and some odd concoction of orange juice-poached shrimp on a cheddar tea biscuit, while Paul did some sort of grouper dish (they chose to berate Ron's dishes most of the time rather than explain Paul's). Some of it sounded OK, and well, I guess it should. These guys obviously know how to eat, as you can see in the slideshow up on their website. The audio is up in the archives, and as you can imagine, it was largely punctuated by Emeril, who, for some reason, has only one mode of communication: loud. But he's still sort of charming and charismatic, in a sugarey, catch-phrasey sort of way.

Anyway, the show was goofy, and sort of funny, and all-in-all a neat start to the SoBe W&F weekend.   

Logan Fazio

Tasty, tasty T-shirt.

The South Beach Wine & Food Festival is already in full swing, and last night, everyone's favorite quasi-cook and abbreviator, Rachel Ray, hosted the third annual Amstel Light Burger Bash at the Ritz-Carlton, South Beach. Our cameras caught all the beefy action, including celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Michelle Bernstein.

However, if they had to award a prize for best T-shirt last night, we think it would have gone to our buddy pictured here. Take that vegan vegetable porn!

Click here to check out the full slide show .

Food & Wine 2009 is almost upon us. You know what that means. The culinary throngs descend on South Florida, feast on its tropical flesh in a media-driven frenzy, and hopefully dump enough money on our shores to keep us goin til next year.

Aaron J. Michaels from Culinary Convenience told me Chef Jason Smith would be a good dude to talk to. Jason Smith is the Chef de Cuisine over at Table 8 South Beach. He talked about Billy Joel, Oprah, and Mario Batali. Here's what he had to say...

I cold-called Escopazzo out of our restaurant database and said, "Hey, I'm from the newspaper, what are you doing for Wine & Food?" Sommelier Rich DiGacomo had great answers for me. He talked about the Food Network, Rachel Ray, Key West prawns and drinking. Here's what he had to say:

I cold-called OLA at Sanctuary to find out if they got anything going on for the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival 2009. I spoke to a real cool dude, sommelier Albert Omahen about fish tacos, wine, and the smoker's palette. Here's what he had to say:

It is early Wednesday morning, and I am standing in a kitchen area in the Miami-Beach Convention Center, watching some 50 FIU students getting to work on food prep for Friday nights' Perrier-Jouët BubbleQ event at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. I am not the only one looking on -- FIU chef-instructor Michael Moran, chef and culinary coordinator of the Festival, is keeping a close eye on things. He is, at the same time, on the phone going over innumerable details with a host of people, directing students on what to do, checking off items on pieces of paper on a table in front of him, and answering my questions -- the first of which regards numbers. "We'll prepare about 1,800 pounds of pork, 1,500 pounds of beef filet, 1,200 pounds of fish, 1,000 pounds of chicken, 800 pounds of cabbage, and several hundred pounds of 'nouveau' potato salad and other side dishes" he replies. The 3,000 guests expected at Friday nights' Champagne BBQ will not go hungry.

This coming Monday morning, January 12th, a second block of tickets for previously sold out events will go on sale. So if you were bummed at being shut out of Rachael Ray's Burger Bash or The Best of the Best at the new Fontainebleau, you've been given a second shot. You can get your tix  at www.sobewineandfoodfest.com or by telephone at 877-762-3933. The Festival takes place February 19th through the 22nd.

--Lee Klein

Starting this morning at 9:00 a.m., the South Beach Wine & Food Festival  is offering a week-long 10% discount on all ticket orders (before tax and service fees). The deal closes Friday, December 19, at 5:00 p.m., and all orders placed by this time are guaranteed delivery before Christmas Day -- hint hint.

To make it easier to give the gift that keeps on fattening, the festival is offering Sobe Bucks in denominations of $250, $500 or $1,000. Lucky recipients of these certificates will be able to redeem them for tickets to events already sold out, such as Food & Wine's The Food Network Amstel Light Allen Brothers Rachel Ray Burger Bash (my phrasing -- but mockery aside, a cool event).    

You can purchase tickets here, but Sobe Bucks can only be bought through emailing the Festival's ticketing manager or by phone: 305-627-1646.

--Lee Klein

We know that the South Beach Food & Wine Festival isn't until next year -- February 19 thru 22 to be exact -- but tickets for the event go quicker than cake at fat camp. So be aware that tickets for all the Food & Wine events goes on sale October 27, and yes, we suggest you purchase tickets then if you really want to go.

You can already start planning out your Food & Wine week because the festival already has some of the events listed. Everyone from Tyler Florence, Michelle Bernstein, Eric Ripert, Emeril Lagasse, Michael Schwartz and more will be on hand for cooking demos, wine tasting and everything in between. Unfortunately, chronic abbreviator and overall annoyance Rachel Ray isn't staying home.

Again, tickets go on sale October 27 and can be purchase online at www.sobewineandfoodfest.com or by calling 1-877-762-3933.

-- Jose D. Duran