The inaugural Savannah Food & Wine Festival will be held from November 11 to 17, 2013.
The weeklong event will fill a traditionally slow week in the city’s cultural calendar. The festival has already attracted a good bit of local and regional press, and there are some fairly big names in the food and wine world who will be headed our way, including Rob Mondavi Jr., and visiting chefs Steven Satterfield, Hugh Acheson, and Chris Hastings.
As noted in a May piece in the Savannah Morning News, the event is an expansion of the Tourism Leadership Council’s annual Taste of Savannah. A big expansion.
I’m excited about the festival, but I honestly don’t know if I’ll end up going to any of it. As regular readers should know, even if they don’t believe it, I pretty much always pay my own way to events and restaurants that I end up writing about. I get press tickets for a few Savannah Music Festival shows each year, but I spend hundreds of dollars on tickets for myself and friends. I don’t like to be on “the list” at clubs, and it makes me nervous when restaurateurs and chefs recognize me and try to send free stuff over. I do get a press pass for the Savannah Film Festival, which I cover extensively, although that process has a couple of years proved quite frustrating.
So I’ve looked several times now at the schedule and prices of the impressive events lined up for the Food & Wine Festival. They look really good and — let’s be honest — quite pricy.
I might yet decide to splurge for a $195 seat at the Celebrity Chef Tour, a “collaboration dinner, featuring several award-winning James Beard Foundation Chefs” at 700 Drayton at the Mansion on Forsyth Park on Wednesday, November 13. But I’m not likely to spend that much for two tickets so I can take along a friend or a date, and it’s probably not the type of event one would enjoy alone, although I do enjoy dining alone pretty often.
The $39 tickets for Taste of Savannah in Ellis Square will probably sell really well, but I’m not sure who will turn out for some of the rest of the events. Maybe there will be a large demand for the Michael Mondavi Family Dinner at 8 p.m. on that Saturday, but the $225 cost seems prohibitive to me. Ditto for the $55 jazz brunch at the Westin on the festival’s final Sunday — one can typically enjoy a jazz brunch at the Aqua Star for somewhat less money.
Perhaps in future years, the Savannah Food & Wine Festival will find a way to incorporate more of the work of local chefs and restaurants. Maybe there will be more populist events that include traditional Lowcountry foods like boils, BBQ, and soul food. Maybe there’s a way to emphasize locally sourced ingredients as the inaugural Revival Fest hopes to do.
Perhaps there will be more events like the recent “Smack down” between Roberto Leoci and Jesse Blanco described with great energy at Eat It and Like It.
Of course, it’s possible that the first Savannah Food & Wine Festival will be so popular that it won’t need to do any of these things I’m imagining.
Maybe wealthy retirees and the business community will step up to the plate in a big way, as they have for so many cultural events in Savannah, and be joined by a variety of younger professionals and well-to-do tourists. I guess we’ll see.
Let me finish by saying how much I love the festival’s official poster, designed by a SCAD student I count among my broad network of downtown friends, Nuntanut Sathityatiwat, aka Nat.
Just take a look at Nat’s poster, with the buggy and the pedicab, the live oak and Spanish moss, the corkscrew, the strawberry dipped in chocolate — and all presented so elegantly and simply. I’d say it’s one of the best festival posters we’ve seen around here in recent years. Click on through to get to the festival’s Facebook page: