The day has come! Tickets for the Austin FOOD & WINE Festival go on sale today, November 8, at 10 a.m. CST. The Festival, which takes place April 26-28, 2013 at Auditorium Shores and Republic Square Park, will feature a myriad of food and wine events, including hands-on seminars, food, wine, and cocktail tastings, book signings, live music performances, and much more.

The first Austin FOOD & WINE Festival was held in April 2012 – taking the place of the long-standing Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival. Tickets are $850 for a Savor pass and $250 for a Taste pass.

The Savor pass includes priority access to demos, tastings, hands-on events, Grand Tastings, VIP lounges, and the Taste of Texas and Rock Your Taco evening events. Unlike last year, Taste pass holders may also purchase individual tickets for Friday night’s Taste of Texas event ($150) and/or Saturday night’s Rock Your Taco event ($200).

Christina Tosi

A lineup of renowned chefs, talented sommeliers, cocktail experts, and food celebrities will headline the festival, including Marcus Sammuelson, Susan Feniger, Christina Tosi, Tim Love, Paul Qui, Andrew Zimmern, Marc Murphy, and numerous others.

Marcus Sammuelson. Photo taken by Paul Brissman.

The Taste of Texas Kickoff Event at Republic Square Park will feature live music performances by Delta Spirit and Whiskey Shivers and tastings from well-known chefs, including: Tim Byres, chef/co-owner of SMOKE; Jason Dady, chef/owner of Jason Dady Restaurant Group; Ned Elliot, executive chef/owner of Foreign & Domestic; Jodi Elliot, pastry chef/owner of Foreign & Domestic; Aaron Franklin, pitmaster of Franklin Barbecue; Terrence Gallivan and Seth Siegel-Gardner, executive chefs/owners of The Pass & Provisions; Sarah Grueneberg, executive chef of Spiaggia; James Holmes, executive chef of Lucy’s Fried Chicken and Olivia; Paul Qui, founder of East Side King; John Russ, executive chef of Lüke; Chris Shepherd, executive chef of Underbelly; Philip Speer, pastry chef of Uchi and Uchiko; Blaine Staniford, executive chef of GRACE; Danny Trace, executive chef of Brennan’s; Tre Wilcox, executive chef of Marquee Grill; Andrew Wiseheart, executive chef of Contigo; and Jamie Zelko, executive chef/owner of Zelko Bistro.

Terrence Gallivan & Seth Siegel-Gardner

At the Rock Your Taco event, a number chefs will compete against each other in creating the “ultimate” taco. Tyson Cole, executive chef of Uchi and winner of last year’s Rock Your Taco competition, will compete against a mix of local and national chefs, including David Bull, executive chef/owner of Congress, Second Bar + Kitchen, and Bar Congress; Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, chef/owners of Animal and Son of a Gun; Susan Feniger, executive chef of Border Grill; Bryce Gilmore, chef/owner of Barley Swine; Tim Love, owner of Love Shack, Lonesome Dove, and Woodshed Smokehouse; Tony Mantuano, chef/partner of Spiaggia; Marc Murphy, executive chef of Landmarc and Ditch Plains; Rene Ortiz, executive chef of La Condesa and Sway; Marcus Samuelsson, chef/owner of Red Rooster Harlem; Laura Sawicki, pastry chef of La Condesa and Sway; Christina Tosi, pastry chef of Momofuku Milk Bar; Jonathan Waxman, chef/owner of Barbuto; and Andrew Zimmern, host of Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods. There will also be a live music performance by Allen Stone at the event.

Paul Qui

The Rock Your Taco winner will be selected by three judges: Christina Grdovic, publisher of FOOD & WINE, Adam Richman, host of Man vs. Food, and a special guest judge. This year’s lineup also features a mix of sommeliers and mixologists, including Tony Abou-Ganim, Devon Broglie, Craig Collins, Anthony Giglio, Ray Isle, Russ Kane, Cathy Mantuano, Bill Norris, Mark Oldman, June Rodil, Jason Stevens, and Nate Wales.

For more information on the fesival or to purchase tickets, please visit the Austin FOOD & WINE Festival website. Follow the Austin FOOD & WINE Festival Twitter and/or Facebook for schedules, details, and news as the festival approaches.

Tagged: 2013 Austin Food & Wine Festival, Andrew Zimmern, Auditorium Shores, austin, Austin Food & Wine Festival, Blaine Staniford, Chris Shepherd, Christina Tosi, Foreign & Domestic, Jamie Zelko, Jason Dady, Jason Dady Restaurant Group, John Russ, Jon Shook, Layne Lynch, Marc Murphy, Marcus Samuelsson, Ned Elliott, Paul Qui, Republic Square Park, smoke, Susan Feniger, Tim Byres, Tim Love, Tre Wilcox, Tyson Cole, Vinny Dotolo

The Austin Film Festival will host their 10th annual Film & Food Party on Wednesday, October 17 at The Driskill Hotel from 7-10 p.m. The culinary event kicks off the 19th annual Austin Film Festival, which takes place from October 18-25. The honorary chair of the evening will be well-known writer/producer/director Robert Rodriguez, noted for his work on films like Desperado, From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Machete, Sin City, and Grindhouse.

John Paul Phillips, Alexis Bledel, and Ryan Piers Williams at the 2011 Film & Food Party.

This event brings together creative minds from both the film and food industries, including Austin restaurants like Foreign & Domestic, Swift’s Attic, Olive & June, Jack Allen’s Kitchen, Ranch 616, Garrido’s, Haddington’s, TRACE, Trento, and several more. “I enjoy the creative collaboration and the chance to be a part of the rich history of Austin’s film community,” Shawn Cirkiel, executive chef of Olive & June, says of the event.

Proceeds from the event will benefit the Austin Film Festival’s Young Filmmakers Program. Tickets are $90 in advance and $100 at the door. Visit Austinfilmfestival.com to purchase tickets.

Tagged: Austin Film Festival, Foreign & Domestic, garrido's, Haddington's, Jack Allen's Kitchen, Layne Lynch, Olive & June, Ranch 616, Robert Rodriguez, Swift's Attic, The Driskill Hotel, TRACE, Trento

The 23rd La Dolce Vita Food & Wine Festival that sponsors the AMOA-Arthouse will take place tonight from 6-9 p.m. at Laguna Gloria.

Food will be served from several Austin restaurants including East Side Showroom, Foreign & Domestic, Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill, Olive & June, Parkside, Ranch 616, and Trace. Famed Austin restaurateur Larry McGuire of Lamberts Downtown Barbecue, Perla’s, Elizabeth Street Café, and Jeffrey’s Restaurant has been chosen as the honorary chef for the evening.

“As a native Austinite, I’ve enjoyed Laguna Gloria, La Dolce Vita, and the museum my entire life, so to be asked to serve as the 2012 Honorary Chef is a real privilege,” Larry McGuire said in a press release. “Not only am I excited about helping AMOA-Arthouse raise funds for its education programs, but I feel that this event stands out from all the other food events in town.”

Cocktails will be prepared by Tipsy Texan’s David Alan and local wineries and distillers including Becker Vineyards, Inwood Estates Vineyards, Llano Estacado Winery, and Pedernales Cellars will be present as well. For more information about the event, check out this link.

Tagged: AMOA-Arthouse, David Alan, East Side Show Room, Foreign & Domestic, Inwood Estates Vineyards, La Dolce Vita Food & Wine Festival, Lamberts Downto, Larry McGuire, Layne Lynch, llano estacado winery, Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill, Olive & June, Parkside, Pedernales Cellars, perla's, Ranch 616, Tipsy Texan, TRACE

Smoke was definitely in the air.

The quintessentially Texas aroma of smoked beef permeated the air at Live Fire! on Thursday evening at the Salt Lick Pavilion in Driftwood, outside Austin.
Billed as the kick-off event for the three-day Austin Wine & Food Festival coming up this weekend, Live Fire! was sponsored by the Austin Food & Wine Alliance. More than two dozen Central Texas chefs, with an outlier from Portland, Oregon, set up smokers and grills under towering pecan trees on the banks of Onion Creek while 650 attendees paid $75 each to stuff themselves silly, listen to music, swill adult beverages, and watch the amazing performers of Fire Knights, who twirled scary-looking flaming staffs with the ease of high school drum majors.
Meanwhile, the chefs cooked Texas beef up, down, and sideways.
There was smoked brisket from local barbecue hero Aaron Franklin of Franklin Barbecue and tongue pastrami sandwiches from Ned Elliott of Foreign & Domestic. Andrew Wiseheart of Contigo changed his last name to “Beefheart” for the night; his booth served up, yes, cured beef heart with a chicory-and-strawberry salad.
Naomi Pomeroy of the appropriately named Beast, in Portland, went native with Texas wagyu medallions topped with wild-ramp butter.

Jason Dady did battle with maurauding flies.

Jason Dady of San Antonio, owner of Tre Trattoria and Bin 555, did slow-cooked charred beef brisket with blue-cheese spoonbread and a caramelized onion purée. He encountered a problem that plagued many booths: “I’ve been fighting flies all night,” he said, sounding exasperated. ”Maybe our food smelled better.”
Josh Watkins of the Carillon could not stop at just one. He did two dishes: beef ribs with corn pudding and also fried beef cheeks with Brussels sprouts brushed with smoked maple syrup. And just exactly how to you smoke a liquid? Turns out there are at least two ways, but the one that worked best was a no-brainer: put a pan of syrup in a smoker. Watkins also proved himself adept at juggling Myer lemons, to the amusement of onlookers.

The most dramatic entry of the evening was Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chef John Bullington’s whole steer, cooked over coals on a specially constructed Argentine-style grill. “We wired very large pieces of meat to the platform, and cooked them for about sixteen hours,” he said. “We turned it once. The beef alone weighed 407 ½ pounds and the metal rack was another 100. It took six guys to flip that sucker.”

Wagyu medallions with tomato-jam tarts.

After so much bovine protein, it was a relief to find a dessert. Erin Echternach, pastry chef at Fino, skewered fresh strawberries and squares of cake to make grilled strawberry shortcake. Her assistant Christiana Rachut volunteered that “Strawberries are the beef of the vegetable world.” Kyle McKinney of Barley Swine made sweet zucchini bread,  grilled and served with dabs of goat cheese mousse and candied walnuts. (Thankfully, neither barley nor swine was involved.)

(A version of this post will appear on TMDailyPost.com.) Photos by Courtney Bond.

Tagged: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Austin Wine & Food Festival, Barley Swine, Bin 555, Contigo, fino, Foreign & Domestic, Live Fire! Austin Food & Wine Alliance, Salt Lick Pavilion, the Carillon, Tre Trattoria

There aren’t many Anna Wintours out there in the world. In fact, most magazine editors generally prefer to stay hidden from the glare of media exposure. Glued to recorders and notepads, they are the ones who conduct interviews, the ones who bury themselves in research, the ones who feel awestruck by celebrities, the ones who keep their opinions to themselves. Gail Simmons is a rare exception.

Her culinary expertise and sophisticated palate make her one of the most respected and talked about minds in food media. This season, viewers watched as Simmons judged Top Chef Texas in the scorching summer days of San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin. Simmons returns to Texas this weekend for the Austin Food & Wine Festival to cook up her version of cowgirl cuisine and devour her way through the festival and its city. Simmons talked with TEXAS MONTHLY about the festival, her experiences while filming Top Chef Texas, and how Austin compares to New York.

Gail Simmons

What’s going on in Austin right now that makes it worthy of its own festival?

Just to be fair, I wasn’t the sole person responsible for bringing Food & Wine to Austin. I certainly spent some time there this past summer and, simultaneously, Food & Wine was working with people in Austin to see if they could make the festival happen, and I’m so glad they did. I don’t think it could be at a better time. For a long time now, Austin has been rumbling and starting to buzz, and the buzz has been getting bigger and bigger, and I think it’s just a perfect moment to bring a big food festival of this caliber down to Austin. I was there for the first time ever this summer when we were filming Top Chef, and, having spent time in Dallas and San Antonio and lots of other places, I certainly felt the second I got to Austin that there was this amazing, young energy of all different kinds of things: music, art, and food, of course. [There are] a lot of great young chefs doing fun, exciting food. Food that really pays attention to the history and traditions of Texas, of barbecue, and Tex-Mex. But at the same time, they are elevating it, refining it, twisting it, making it modern, and making it their own. It’s a great time to show that off to the world.

What was your filming experience like in Texas? You guys have been all over on Top Chef. What was the highlight of the Top Chef Texas filming?

We had a lot of fun in Texas, and I had never been to the state of Texas before. I didn’t know what to expect, and I was very nervous about the fact that we were filming for the full summer. July was the hottest month on the record in like sixty years, if you recall, so that made for a pretty daunting introduction to Texas. But, I have to say, we had a blast. It was the first season we did where we moved within a season from city to city, so that brought a huge element to the season. I learned so much because there was a lot that I didn’t know about [Texas] in terms of learning about barbecue, learning about Tex-Mex, learning about the history of that part of America that I really had no exposure to until then. The food was great, too. We specifically had a blast in Austin. We went out and saw live music almost every single night when we weren’t working. We ate at a lot of food trucks. We would get off at eleven at night and go sit at a little food truck park and get a six-pack of Shiner Bock, drink cold beer, and sit outside underneath the hanging lights. It was a blast. And there are some amazing restaurants there.

Who are you looking forward to seeing at the festival?

I’m very excited to see Paul [Qui], the winner of Top Chef Texas. I’m excited that now that the show is over he and I can just be friends and I can actually just hang out with him, have a cocktail, and get to know him a little better. When I was there in July last summer, I visited Barley Swine and absolutely adored it. I was just so completely enamored with the space, and I had known the chef a little bit because Bryce [Gilmore] is a Food & Wine Best New Chef, so I had gotten to know him a little bit the year before, but it was great to see him in his own setting and finally eat his food. I’ll definitely be visiting him, too. There are places I still want to check out. I never got a chance to go to Foreign & Domestic, and I’ve heard such amazing things about them. I’m really looking forward to the Rock Your Taco event on Saturday night that I’ll be judging. I think that’ll be really fun because there are some Texas chefs and chefs from out of the state. It’ll be fun to see them go head-to-head with their best tacos.

You’re doing a demo, right?

I’m doing a cooking demo. When I was in Texas, I was inspired by the food, and I’m doing a demo that pays an ode to cowboy food. Chefs like Tim Love are going to be there doing cooking demos with big pieces of meat, grilling, and all that stuff. I’m doing what we named Cowgirl Cookin’. I’m cooking with all those really great flavors that I was inspired by in Texas, but that are made in a feminine way. I’m actually not cooking with any meat, but there is some meat flavoring. I mean, you got add bacon in! Just a little bit. I’m cooking mussels steamed in Shiner Bock and I’m doing cheddar, bacon, and chive biscuits. I’m also doing a peach skillet pudding. This stuff is inspired by my time in Texas, but is a little lighter, very refreshing, and perfect for the summer.

You live and work in New York. How would you compare its dining culture to Austin’s?

The culinary world takes tips from each other all the time. Chefs travel. The word travels. Trends travel, and I’m seeing a lot of trends in New York that I think are really influenced by Austin and vice-versa. The food truck culture that has been going on in Austin for so long has really only been in New York for the last two years. I think that no one does it better than Austin. They’re inexpensive, but have great, flawless food. I love that there can be three or four of them right by each other, but each of them will have really different cuisine. The creativity is really high in Austin. I see a lot of similarities between New York, in that way. In New York right now there are also a ton of Southern restaurants opening. Not necessarily Texan restaurants, specifically, but there has been a huge amount of barbecue places that are opening all over New York. Hill Country Barbecue, certainly, and others. A lot of the same aesthetic that young, hyper-creative Austin chefs are bringing to their food can be said the same of New York: young chefs who have exceptional formal culinary training who want to do something different and who are starting small. Barley Swine is a great example. [Bryce] is starting small and doing something very focused that is casual and comfortable. There is no pretense, but the food is pushing us forward.

Are you doing another season of Top Chef Desserts anytime soon?

We are doing another season of Top Chef proper, first. That’s all I know. One series at a time. It takes up so much time to shoot, so when we start shooting that later on this year, we’ll go from there.

Tagged: austin, Austin Food and Wine Festival, Bryce Gilmore, Foreign & Domestic, Gail Simmons, Paul Qui

There’s nothing like a bandwagon. No sooner did Food & Wine and Bon Appétit fall all over themselves to give Austin a whole lotta love than StarChefs.com (an online magazine for chefs and culinary insiders) decided to hold one of its four national awards ceremonies in Austin this year.  Their editorial board scoured the landscape for the top talent in Texas’ capital city (and in San Antonio, too) and recently announced more than a dozen winners in nine categories.

As a result, in February, a gaggle of the hottest chefs in Austin and San Antonio are going to be in one place at one time, offering samples of their best bites. And there will be some choice wine and cocktail sips too.

Here’s what you need to know: The tasting will be held on Tuesday, February 21, from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the Driskill Hotel. Tickets are $85 for regular admission, $125 for VIP, and can be purchased online at starchefs.com/tickets or by calling 212-966-7575.

So, is StarChefs.com on the mark as far as their choices go? In my humble opinion, absolutely. They considered around 60 candidates (which they found through talking to local media and doing their own research, followed up by in-person tastings and interviews).

OK, it’s time to cut to the chase. Who won?

In the chefs category, it’s David Bull, Congress; Ned Elliott, Foreign & Domestic; Aaron Franklin, Franklin Barbecue; Bryce Gilmore, Barley Swine; Rene Ortiz, La Condesa; Paul Qui, Uchiko; Quealy Watson, The Monterey, in San Antonio; Andrew Wiseheart, Contigo.

In the pastry chefs category, it’s Plinio Sandalio, Carillon; Philip Speer, Uchiko. In the sustainability chef category, it’s Michael Sohocki, Restaurant Gwendolyn, in San Antonio. In the hotel chef category, it’s Josh Watkins, Carillon. In the artisan category, it’s John Bates and Brandon Martinez, Noble Pig. In the restaurateurs category, Tyson Cole, the Uchi group; Jason Dady, Bin 555, Tre Trattoria, Two Bros. BBQ Market, all in San Antonio. In the sommelier category, it’s June Rodil, Congress. In the mixologist category, it’s Jeret Peña, The Esquire, in San Antonio.

The host chef is  Jonathan Gelman, Driskill Grill. (By the way, the photograph is from a StarChefs.com  gala held in New York last year.)

Tagged: Aaron Franklin, Andrew Wiseheart, austin, Barley Swine, Bin 555, Bon Appetit, Brandon Martinez, Bryce Gilmore, Carillon, Congress, Contigo, David Bull, driskill grill, Food & Wine, Foreign & Domestic, Franklin Barbecue, Jason Dady, Jeret Pena, John Bates, Johnathan Gelman, Josh Watkins, June Rodil, la condesa, Michael Sohocki, Ned Elliott, Noble Pig, Paul Qui, Philip Speer, Plinio Sandalio, Quealy Watson, Rene Ortiz, Restaurant Gwendolyn, san antonio, StarChefs.com, the Monterey, Tre Trattoria, Two Bros. BBQ Market, Tyson Cole, uchi, uchiko