SoBe 2010 Wine & Food Festival – The Ultimate Culinary Experience

  By: Kim Michele

Once again the South Beach Wine & Food Festival lived up to expectations. With a host of celebrity chefs cooking up a storm, we eagerly devoured more than our share of delicious dishes. Coupled with some of the world’s finest wines, the best of Miami’s local restaurants and an abundance of culinary personalities, we were in for a real treat.

To kick off the 9^th annual South Beach Wine & Food Festival, Chefs Daniel Boulud, Jose Garces, Masaharu Morimoto, and Kris Wessel collaborated to create the delicious menu served at one of Miami’s most iconic Haitian restaurants, Tap Tap. The entire evening was dedicated to helping raise funds for the Partners in Health Haiti earthquake relief fund and turned out to be a great success.

Hosted by Rachael Ray, the Amstel Light Burger Bash was one of the highlight of the festival. Talk about making burgers an art form, it was hard to decide which creation was more scrumptious. Lucky we didn’t have to decide as the judges crowned their new winner – Chef Michael Symon of Iron Chef fame. His ‘Fat Doug’ Swiss cheeseburger certainly deserved the accolade. To end the evening we indulged in what is considered to be the world’s ‘best’ chocolate chip cookie. And oh were they good! Note I said ‘they’ – far too good to just eat just one.

From there we ate and drank our way through the Perrier-Jouët BubbleQ, hosted by Emeril Lagasse and then Wine Spectator’s Best of the Best attended by the who’s who of great chefs. While making our way from one delicious tasting to another, we had the pleasure of meeting Masaharu Morimoto, and more to the point, enjoying his mouth-watering menu.

The weekend brought the ultimate tasting experience more commonly known as the Whole Foods Grand Tasting Village. Every year this tented event held on SoBe’s white sandy beaches, attracts thousands of people, there to taste the best of Miami’s inspired cuisine, ingeniously mixed cocktails, and a host of international wines and spirits. This is also the place to watch your favorite Food Network Chef’s in action as they come to life on the KitchenAid stage. Anthony Bourdain graced us with his presence, keeping the audience thoroughly entertained. It is always a pleasure to see him as he comes up with the most off the wall things. This was certainly culinary entertainment at its best.

As if we hadn’t already had enough, we soon headed out to the Wine & Food Festival’s grand finale. Held at the Gansevoort South on their private beach under the perfect Miami moon, Guy Fieri hosted what was certainly one of the best closing night parties I have been to. It was the perfect way to rap up the 2010 SoBe Food & Wine Festival and now we can start counting the days till next year’s event.

journeyPod is no stranger to the South Beach Wine & Food Festival! Check out some of our SoBe podcasts from the last couple of years!