The Preheat
Delicious Austin Food & Wine Festival serves up 2023 dates and presale
Austin Food & Wine Festival is returning this November.
It's a big week for festival news in Austin. In fact C3 Presents, the Austin-based event management company, has a hand in both. Yesterday, Austin City Limits announced its 2023 schedule, sending fans into a planning frenzy. Food & Wine Magazine also made a big announcement: Austin's greatest tasting event has landed on its official dates this fall.
Austin Food & Wine Festival is gearing up for a return on November 4 and 5, with ticket presales opening on August 22 at 10 am.
This foodie frenzy brings the best Austin chefs, restaurants, and drinks together in a staggering row of white tents. The main goal for attendees is to try as much as possible, lining up at each station for snack-sized sliders, tacos, ceviche, desserts, and countless other creative bites.
It's like a more tolerable amusement park: There's lots of lines, but they're much faster and there's a snack at the end. Here are last year's highlights from booths with almost no lines, for motivation.
If alternating between waiting and eating is not your cup of tea, though, there's more to do. Past festivals have included way more than enough drink vendors to get everyone squared away without a wait, a cool barbecue pit that visitors gather around to watch the all-day smoking, a dance floor with a live DJ, and more fun activations along the perimeter and outside of main festival hours.
Multiple onsite tents house demonstration spaces. One includes a small kitchen where well-known chefs put on step-by-step tutorials — with the help of a close-up camera — while making specialty dishes. Another is set up for tastings, where vendors will lay out individual portions and talk about important context, like historical uses of ingredients or sustainable sourcing.
Finally, a gift shop tent is full to the brim with local cookbooks and other kitchen goods that expand upon the talks. (Hint: This is a great place to do some holiday shopping.)
It's still too early for a chef lineup or after-hours events, but past events have included exclusive dinners and competitions. All chefs, though, will have a strong Texas presence.
Presale tickets will be available to online users who provide a phone number at austinfoodandwinefestival.com. General sales will open on August 24 at 10 am.
