Are you vaccinated? South Beach food festival will require proof or test to attend
South Florida is about to become a lab for the first big experiment in food festivals in the age of the coronavirus.
Tickets for the 2021 South Beach Wine & Food Festival will go on sale March 22 for a four-day event that expects to draw more than 20,000 people to South Beach — but will look much different than in the past in this, its 20th year. The website, sobewff.org, is active to browse events today.
The festival, which was pushed back from February to May 20-23 as COVID-19 cases surged, is betting on vaccines becoming more widespread. Among the most notable guidelines, guests will have to provide proof of being vaccinated or show a negative coronavirus test less than three days old before attending any event.
“There’s no prize for being the first (food festival) back. We’re coming back to support the local food industry. And hopefully we can set the standard,” festival founder Lee Schrager said.
Guests will be required to wear masks whenever they are not eating. The festival will provide masks if the one a guest brings does not meet its standard. Guests who refuse will not be allowed to attend. The full guidelines are available at sobewff.org/covid-guidelines.
Cutting capacity and holding all but the wine-tasting events outdoors are the most obvious changes to this year’s festival, which normally draws more than 60,000 guests to South Florida. The number of events has been cut from about 110 to 68, with five in Broward County and one in Palm Beach.
The large outdoor events that have been the festival’s hallmark will still go on, albeit at half capacity and broken up into two sessions with an hourlong cleaning period in between. For example, Burger Bash will be held under the same size tent that regularly holds 4,000 but will be broken up into a morning and evening session of 1,000 people each. The same goes for the Grand Tasting and the Champagne BubbleQ with Guy Fieri.
The smaller intimate dinners with chefs, which usually seat 100, will be halved and held in outdoor spaces, no event seating more than 40 to 50. Festival goers will be seated at individual tables depending on their party’s size. Guests who want to sit together will have to buy tickets together.
Big-name chefs will still highlight the festival.
Among them are, for the first time, French Laundry and Surf Club founder Thomas Keller, Virgilio Martinez of Peru’s famous Central, Michael White of Osteria Morini and Mexican haute cuisine pro Enrique Olvera.
But this year, despite the pall of the pandemic, many Miami-based chefs who have risen to prominence are also featured. All James Beard nominees, Zak Stern (Zak the Baker) and Luciana Giangrandi and Alex Meyer (Boia De), are leading a Locals Only dinner. Michelle Bernstein is partnering with pastry master Antonio Bachour and the former chef-owners of the long-gone Miami cult favorite Hy Vong Vietnamese restaurant to celebrate the release of their cookbook-memoir, “Mango and Peppercorns: A Memoir of Food, an Unlikely Family, and the American Dream.”
The festival, which benefits Florida International University and relies on its hospitality students to staff events, had to get approval of these guidelines from the university and the city of Miami Beach before going ahead with its plan. FIU’s infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists advised Miami-Dade County in creating its business and restaurant reopening plans.
Still, Schrager said the festival expects to lose a whopping $700,000, as this year it is reimbursing chefs with stipends for catering events that chefs usually do for free, to help promote their restaurants.
“In 20 years, we never had a loss,” Schrager said. “We saved money every year for a rainy day, and this is our rainy day.”
This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 9:00 AM.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story erroneously included chef Mike Beltran as a participant in the Locals Only dinner.
